


Son of the Witch

by WareWolf



Series: Hunter and King [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Crowley Being Less of an Asshole, Definitely season 11 AU from chapter 4, M/M, My Take on The Darkness, Rowena and Amara referred to, Season/Series 11 Spoilers, Sequel to My Demon (1) and Crowley's Deal (2)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-27
Updated: 2016-05-21
Packaged: 2018-05-16 16:31:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 29,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5832706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WareWolf/pseuds/WareWolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is number 3 in my series [now called <i>Hunter and King</i>] beginning with <i>My Demon</i> and continuing with <i>Crowley’s Deal</i>.  It’s an AU series following the show fairly closely into season 11, with the addition of Bobby Singer, who changes a great deal for Crowley.   Their major problem is not so much Lucifer or the Darkness as it is a certain ginger-haired witch, Crowley's unmotherly mother Rowena, who has "corked" his abilities in a particularly personal way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

“Tell me why I’m choking on piles of dust and also freezing my arse off in the dark?”

The plaintive voice, with its distinctive Londoner’s accent, issued from the far side of a pile of books which appeared to begin from the floor of a dusty living room and rise a good six feet above it.  Only when someone looked closely could they discern the outlines of a table, buried in the bibliophilic mass.

“Because this collector was one of the best sources for lore I ever found.”

“Was?”

“Right, Crowley, we’re ransacking his home while he’s out for a walk.   He was eighty nine, and died last week in his bed.  I got a letter from the guy sortin’ out his estate, and the key.  Basically, I can come and look over the stock today and tomorrow and take what I like,”  Bobby Singer explained absently, as he studied how he might pull out a text without causing those above it to cascade on to him.  “This guy was the worst – or the best – hoarder of books I ever knew and he had kinda a weird gift – books about magic, that _had_ magic, were drawn to him.  You wouldn’t believe what he’d discover in the middle of somebody’s Trixie Beldon collection or whatever.  Hey, come on over here.  I need you to levitate these books.”

He heard shuffling and low swearing, before his companion appeared around the book pyramid, dusting off his black coat.  Bobby withheld a grin;  Crowley, King of Hell, was known to lack a sense of humour when he was on a rant.  He was right about one thing, though, no, two.  This house was full of dust and mouse shit and the only thing that made it warmer than the autumnal air outside was the lack of wind.  The bookseller’s talents hadn’t extended to housework or paying his utilities.

“I was happy to join you on this nostalgic trip back to scenic Sioux Falls,”  the demon continued, still brushing his clothes.  “Though I am somewhat intrigued by the fact that your friend’s bequest still reached you despite your official, ah, demise.”

Bobby shrugged.  “Post office boxes don’t care if their owners are alive or not so long as the fee gets paid.”

“Hm.”  Crowley cast a disparaging look about the room.  “So, have you found _anything_ of value?”

“Don’t know yet,”  Bobby said, touching the spine of the text he had spotted.  The only visible part of the title was DEMON.  The book itself was a black cloth cover and apart from that, only instinct had made him stop and look a second time.  He shone his flashlight around the pile.  “How’s your mojo these days?  Can you lift everything above it so I can pull this one out?”

Crowley sighed.  “Do you _want_ demons homing in on the signal?”

“Sorry,”  Bobby said.  He knew Crowley had been experiencing what he called “an erratic state” re his powers, but the demon had been close-mouthed as to details.    Bobby did know he had failed to teleport at least once, though he said that had been a “brief aberration” and that everything was fine now.  It could be, he thought, that Crowley wanted to keep a low profile even from his own people when he visited Bobby. 

Bobby looked thoughtfully at the King of Hell beside him in the cheerless grey light leaking through the house’s dirt-smeared windows.  He could see Crowley reasonably clearly, enough to note that his expression was worried as well as exasperated.  He was clean-shaven these days, reminding Bobby of how he’d looked when all he had to worry about was being an effective crossroads demon.  [“All?” he could imagine Crowley demanding].   

Now, Crowley turned his attention to the pile of books.  “I don’t think you need magic, love.  See, if you put your hands around the books _here_ , and lift, I can slide out this one and you simply set them down again.”  Bobby couldn’t see it, but he did as Crowley said, and the demon adroitly slid out the desired book.  Bobby carefully re-set the books above it and both of them held their breath.

“Good,”  the hunter murmured , exhaling a short time later.  “Now, let’s see what we’ve….”

He didn’t see what hit him, but it was definitely books.  After the first blow, he was on the floor, trying to protect his head from the avalanche.  At first he didn’t know where Crowley was, and then realised that the area below him was rather softer than the floor should be and that he’d fallen on the admittedly well-padded front of Crowley.  Muttering apologies, he knocked books off himself and scrambled awkwardly to his feet, reaching out a hand to help Crowley.  “You ok?”

Crowley’s form blinked out and reappeared with him on his feet.  With a crooked eyebrow, he held out the single book he’d managed to hold on to.  Bobby started laughing, and the demon quickly took his elbow and guided him firmly away from the books.  “Lightning does strike twice, darling.  I don’t suppose you could do me a huge favour?”

“I won’t tell ‘em,”  Bobby promised solemnly.  “It’s not like it’s gonna come up.”  He held his prize up to the weak sunlight.  “ _Demon Delights._   Sounds like a recipe book.”

“Ah.”  Crowley quickly retrieved it.  “Perhaps I had better….”

“Hey.  Give it back.”  Crowley only grinned at him and dodged out of his reach.  “Do you know what’s in it?  You do, don’t you?”

“Spells.”

“Uh huh.  So what’s the problem?  I’m not gonna use them unless some demon gets in my way.  I don’t exactly go looking for your brethren, you know.”  Bobby’s eyes narrowed.  “ _Demon Delights._   Wouldn’t be sex magic, would it?”

“Ah….”

“Incubi and succubi?”

“It’s a training manual for the above, if you must know.  Not likely to be of the slightest use to you, darling.”

Bobby glared at him.  “I’m still tryin’ to work out if that’s an insult.  Come on, Crowley, hand it over or we’re goin’ cold turkey.”

“Oh, now that’s low.”

“Makes me wonder who wrote the thing’.”  A sudden change in the demon’s expression made Bobby whistle softly and grin.  “Gotcha.  Come on, give it back or Sam and Dean and the others are going to hear all about your klutzy episode, _Rey del infierno._ ”

That got a grin and Bobby had to smile back at him.  Crowley’s title just sounded pretty good in Spanish and he’d begun using it as a sort of pet name.  “Come on,”  he said coaxingly.  “What’s so bad about me readin’ it anyway?”

“I didn’t write the dialogue; it was a compulsory team effort,”  Crowley warned, but handed him the book.

Outside in the street, they lugged Bobby’s finds to the truck.  The hunter looked around quietly for a moment.  “It’s weird comin’ back here,”  he said.  “First I thought people were gonna recognise me, the town drunk, but nobody has.  And I’m not even in disguise.  I could probably even go to the junk yard.”  He looked wistfully in that direction.

“It’s not there, love,”  Crowley reminded him.  Bulldozed flat and turned into a housing estate, in fact, according to Sam, who had checked up on it for him.  “Hope they don’t dig in the wrong place then,”  Bobby had muttered.  So long as he didn’t actually see the site which had been Singer Salvage, he felt, he could still envision it as it had been, his home for so long.  The house on the edge of the little Kansas town he dwelt in now, that didn’t feel like home.  He felt bad thinking it;  the boys and Garth had gone to some trouble to set that up for him.

“I don’t think I’ll need to come back tomorrow,”  Bobby said, trying to get back to normal.  Whatever the hell that meant for him.  “I’m pretty tired, though, so I reckon I’ll stay in the motel tonight.”

“You just don’t want to let me teleport you.”

“Dead right,”  agreed Bobby Singer.  “So.  You coming along?”

*

Sam Winchester saw the truck first, while his brother was off in the bushes “jettisoning some beer.”  They had parked over the far side of the motel’s carpark and Bobby parked on the near side.  He didn’t seem to have spotted either the Impala or Sam and was intent on getting boxes out of the back of his truck.  A short, stocky figure jumped down from the passenger side and went to assist.  With a faint feeling of surprise, Sam recognised Crowley.

He was wearing his usual black coat, but with something blue under it, and no tie.  He said something – Sam heard the familiar accent but not the words – and Bobby laughed, reaching to brush something off the demon’s shoulder.  They carried boxes towards one of the motel room doors and Bobby leaned on it, balancing the box while he delved in his pocket for a key.  More laughter, some joking. 

“He here?”  Dean emerged, zipping up.

“Yeah, they’re taking some boxes in so looks like Bobby got a decent haul.  Me, I’d like someone to leave me money, but if he likes old books better….”

“They?  Crowley’s here?”

“Be nice.  Or at least, don’t be lethal.”

Sam knocked, Dean hanging back a little.  The door opened a little and there was Crowley, not looking surprised.  The demon raised brows at Sam, smirked at Dean and stepped back.  “Well, come in.”  He walked around the pile of boxes and Bobby, kneeling down to examine them, then settled himself in a chair against the wall.  Dean and Sam looked at him with identically suspicious expressions, then both decided he was not a threat at that precise moment.  Bobby dusted off a book and peered at its spine.

“You could’ve left those in the truck,”  Dean commented.

“And have them ripped off overnight?”  Bobby countered, as though Dean had suggested leaving his children outside.  “Not a chance.  Besides, now you boys can take a load back to the cabin for me.”

“About that,”  Sam said.

“Come on, it’s only a couple of hours out of your way, once you get to the main road heading to Lebanon….”

“It’s not that,”  Dean cut in and Crowley chuckled softly.  “What do you think is so frigging funny?”

“So cute the way you finish one another’s sentences.”

Dean muttered something, unable to come up with an immediate rejoinder.  Sam looked thoughtfully towards the demon.  He was wearing a cobalt blue t-shirt, of all things, with black suit trousers.  Not something of Bobby’s; it looked new and fit well.  The memory of Crowley’s face, in the presence of his mother, her contempt for him, had stayed with Sam.  The demon’s tense misery had struck a chord within him.  Sam had thought, though he had said nothing to Dean, that no one should be quite that abandoned.  Even one of the hellspawn.  It was true that Crowley had made it possible for Rowena to remove Dean’s Mark and he had not known, none of them had, what that would bring.

Now, though, he seemed relaxed, even content, and his dig had lacked his usual barbs.  He had not missed Sam’s look of frustration at not being given the chance to finish, though, and asked, “What did you want to say about the cabin, Moose?”

Bobby stood with a grunt and rubbed his lower back.  “You okay?”  Dean asked.

“It got demolished,”  Sam said, across his brother’s words.

“What the hell?”  Bobby roared.  “You come in here and pussyfoot around when you know that?  Again?  How did it “get demolished?”  Did you two do something to my house?”

“Last night,”  Sam said doggedly, “some neighbour of yours called the fire department when he saw flames in your house, but since none of your neighbours are all that nearby, it was pretty well advanced by the time he saw it and there wasn’t much they could do.”

Stunned, Bobby stared back at him and at Dean, then looked at Crowley, who got up and came to his hunter, putting an arm quietly around him.  For once, not even Dean said anything about that.

“Green flames,”  Sam said softly.  “Other colours, but he mentioned the green.”

“Witchfire,”  Crowley said, like a curse.

“So today that story was all over the town and a hunter heard it.  She called Dean and told him.  We’d already been on our way to see you, so we went to check on the situation and we found traces of magic done, but couldn’t find any solid evidence.  So then we followed you here.”

Crowley’s face as he listened was grim.  Sam looked at him and knew he had put the pieces together.  Rowena had struck at Bobby, perhaps believing him to be in the house at the time, or else knowing he was not, wanting Crowley to know how close she had gotten.  Dean doubted that Crowley’s regard for Bobby was genuine, thinking he was playing some scheme;  Sam did not.  Perhaps it was his own history, his time with Ruby, that played through his mind now, but he knew there were demons who remembered their humanity.  Even before the trials, he had thought Crowley did.

“We know she’s trying to gather a coven,”  Sam said, speaking as much to Crowley as to Bobby.  “There also seem to be demons hunting her.  Your demons?”

Crowley laughed.  “Would you have a problem with that?”

“We want you to come back to the bunker with us, Bobby,”  Dean cut in, evidently tired of being sidelined.  “I know you don’t like the underground thing but there’s a door leading outside….you can get out when you want…”

“With armed guards?”  Bobby scoffed.

“You don’t have any of your protections, with the house gone,”  Sam said.  “And you….”  He met Crowley’s smirk with a glare of his own.  “Is the King of Hell going to hang around twenty four seven to guard you from his mother?”

“Considering I’d like to send her below permanently, it doesn’t sound like so bad an idea,”  Crowley snapped, but something flickered in his eyes. 

“Okay,”  Bobby sighed.  “You two, outside.  I need a word with Crowley.  Go on.”

Before the force of his glare, the Winchesters left the motel room.  “They listening?”  Bobby asked and the demon shook his head;  no.  “All right.  You _can’t_ be here all the time, can you?  You said yourself when I called you, that you could only stay a few hours because you had stuff to take care of downstairs.  I thought you’d put down the latest little rebellion your mother set off before you kicked her out…”

Crowley shrugged.  “It never ends, love.  Hell, you know.  I hate to say it, but Gigantor is right.  If they’re correct – also something I hate to admit – and mother dearest flattened your house, you’re safer in their burrow until that gets sorted out.  I can have demons watch the bunker from outside and let me know if Rowena does try to get in.”

“Bein’ bait ain’t my favourite thing,”  Bobby grumbled, thinking of how he had planned to spend the evening.  “Look, can’t you be there some of the time?  If I can talk some sense into Frick and Frack there, you can come see me, can’t you?”

Crowley’s expression was oddly hopeful and Bobby thought he might have read the demon right for once.  He patted his shoulder and left the room, walking the few metres to where Sam and Dean stood talking by the black Impala.  “I appreciate you findin’ me and tellin’ me what happened,”  he said.  “But I want Crowley with me.  Free passage in and out of the bunker for him, that’s what I want.”

“Bobby, we know you don’t want to hear it,”  Sam began uncomfortably, “but I kind of know where you’re coming from, because of Ruby and how she….”

Bobby growled, very like a werewolf.  “Crowley ain’t tryin’ to convince me of anything,”  he said.  “Damn it, Sam, you were there when his mother made it crystal clear what she thought of him.  He don’t like talking about it, but I’ve gotten enough out of him to make it clear;  he thinks _nobody_ can love him.  That nobody ever did.  No, don’t shuffle your damn feet and look away.  This ain’t a sex thing.  I’m talking about _love._   You know what it’s like, dealing with somebody who thinks he ain’t worth loving?  And who at the same time can pretty well destroy the world?”

“Messed up,”  Sam ventured.

“That don’t begin to get close.  He’s trying.  He’s got a thing for me, yeah, and I still haven’t figured that out, but I’ve kind of got a thing for him too, and I know, if I push him away – and goin’ with you to the bunker without him is gonna be pushing him away – I might lose him.   And I’m not goin’ to listen to any more freaking out from you two about the fact that he’s a him.  Maybe you need him for his abilities, but I need him or the rest of the battle ain’t worth crap to me.  He’s in or I’m going off somewhere with him that’s not your damn burrow.”

Bobby could feel himself blushing, but refused to look away.  Sam and Dean flicked a glance at one another, a mutual shrug.  “I’m gonna put sigils on all the doors of rooms I don’t want him in,”  Dean warned.

“Fine.  Don’t trust him.  Whatever.  That he expects.  Now, I need some rest before I go anywhere so I’m gonna stay here tonight.  You can head back or do the same.”

“We’ll get a room here,”  Dean began.

“Somewhere else, if you don’t mind.  Crowley’s gonna be here tonight and well, we got a room first, if you get my meaning.”

“Right,”  Sam said.

“Somewhere else,” agreed Dean.

“Goodbye,”  added Bobby. 


	2. Chapter 2

Bobby waited until the Winchesters had got hastily into the car and the engine started before returning to the motel room, where he found that Crowley had used the time to mostly undress.  “All done,”  he told him, before following suit.  “They didn’t even argue.  Makes me wonder what they’re up to.”

Crowley flopped down on his back, smirking up at the hunter.  “Let me show you how little I care, darling.”

Bobby smiled back at him, again conscious of the strangeness of their situation….and how little _he_ cared what the boys – or anyone – thought of it.  Sure, any hunters who heard rumours of him with a man would wonder about it, but they wouldn’t believe how non-demonic Crowley could actually be.  Downright cuddly, in fact, though it was far from safe to suggest that to him.

Crowley thought those traits were weakness, certainly other demons did, but Bobby thought those streaks of humanity were why he could love Crowley.  Part of it, anyway.  It had taken the hunter a long time to accept that this was not disloyalty to Karen, to love someone else.  She had always seen more clearly than he had.  To her, the fact that Crowley was a man would be almost inconsequential.

He just wished he could get it through Crowley’s head that it was mutual;  honestly, if it wasn’t, what did the demon think he was doing?  Playing him towards some nasty ambush, in league with Sam and Dean or something?  Bobby wanted sometimes to grab him by the shoulders and just shake him, King of Hell or not.

Instead, he sat down on the bed beside Crowley and turned towards him, shifting in close to put an arm over his chest. “I think I got ‘em okay with you coming along to the bunker, at least till we get a lead on Rowena…What?”

“I still can’t come with you, love.  There are….things in Hell I need to watch, that are progressing much faster than I expected.”

“I just put myself out on a limb for you.  Sam and Dean could’ve decided I was way too gone and ganked me…or you…or plain stopped talkin’ to me.  Did you hear what I said to them?”

“Actually yes, “  Crowley said.  He sounded tired and Bobby looked towards him, though he could only see the demon’s profile from where he was lying.

“And you’re not gonna tell me what you’ve got in Hell that you have to go check on?”

“Something that could consolidate my power,”  Crowley whispered.  “I could stop having to look behind me wherever I go, topside _or_ below.  I could deal with my damned – with Rowena.  I could look after you.”

“Not askin’ you to do that,”  Bobby said roughly.  “I just wish you could trust me, is all.”  He let his arm lie across Crowley’s chest, feeling him breathe, aching for him and knowing, for he had just told the boys so, how great the damage was and that it was a miracle Crowley could trust him as much as he did, to lie with him here.  “Come here,”  he murmured at last.  “Jes’ come here.”  And Crowley did, turning to lie against him chest to chest, letting Bobby’s arm encircle him.  “It’s all right, Crowley.  It’ll be okay.”  He felt the King of Hell’s breathing ease, his body relax into simple human tiredness and, yes, trust.  As much as he can, Bobby thought, stroking Crowley’s back.  Yeah, as much as he can.

He had expected Crowley to be gone when he woke, as was so often the case, but it seemed that the demon felt protective, for he was sitting on the bed when Bobby opened his eyes, fully dressed except for shoes.  The black shirt and silver paisley tie were back, the blue t-shirt gone to wherever Crowley stowed his gear that he wasn’t wearing.  Crowley smiled when he saw that Bobby was awake and handed him a large mug of coffee, which the hunter was _sure_ the demon had not been holding a second ago.

“Sam and Dean just drove up,”  Crowley told him.  “I wanted to be sure they were here before I left.”

“Don’t need a babysitter,”  Bobby grumbled.  Crowley simply raised his eyebrows in that perfect polite incredulity Bobby imagined he used on inefficient subordinates.  The hunter sipped the coffee, which was of course excellent, wanting at least a little caffeine to bolster him before he had to deal with more Winchester/Crowley drama.  He reached to carefully set the mug down on the bedside table, hearing a car door slam as he did so.  “I kind of….”  Another lift of eyebrow.  He was nearly out of time.  “Kind of need you, though,”  Bobby Singer muttered.

Crowley launched himself forward, landing on Bobby’s chest and making him huff as the air was pushed out of him.  He moved his arms to hold the demon, who was cuddling into him as close as he could, murmuring words in that low, rough voice which Bobby couldn’t quite make out.  Didn’t need to.  “Soon as I can,”  he made out.  “When I’m sure things are going as I want them to.”   Two loud bangs on the door.  Bobby lifted his head a little.

“In a minute!”  he yelled.

“You’re not making out, are you?”  Dean called back.

“Just say the word, darling,”  Crowley muttered.  He shifted back off Bobby and stood, his shoes on his feet without, of course, any messing around with the laces.  Then there was only empty space where he had been and Bobby, thinking he would never get used to that, went to open the door and glare at Dean Winchester.

“His hair is kind of mussed,”  Sam commented behind his brother.  “I think they were making out.”

“Crowley ain’t here,”  Bobby growled.  “And my hair, what there is, is none of your business.  So let’s get goin’.”

“He left you on your own?”  Sam said, clearly surprised.

“He left when you guys arrived,”  Bobby said, editing a little.  “As I’ve told you before, he doesn’t find you two the best company for some reason and I’m startin’ to see why.  So how about you load my books and we get moving?”

*

On the way, Bobby learned of Sam and Dean’s latest run-in with Crowley’s errant witch mother and that they had managed to get back the codex, but not the _Book of the Damned_ for which it was a key.  Might slow her down, Bobby conceded, though he had a hard time thinking a witch would really be a threat to an experienced hunter like himself, even if she had burned down his cabin.  They also told him about Castiel’s impromptu arrival and that the angel was “recuperating at home” for a few weeks.

“I suggested Netflix to him and we, uh, haven’t seen him too much for awhile,”  Sam admitted, turning in his seat to talk to Bobby as Dean drove the Impala into the underground car park.  “He might try to hook you in to watching _Orange is the New Black_ with him and asking you stuff about women’s prisons, but nothing you can’t cope with, right?”

 

“Thanks a heap,”  Bobby said. “You two planning not to be there or something?”

“We’ve got a job we need to take care of,”  Sam explained, as they lugged box after box of Bobby’s loot into the bunker, dumping them on tables in the library.  “You’ll be ok here if you stay inside;  the sigils will hide you…”

“Teach your goddamned grandfather,”  Bobby retorted ungratefully.  “Yeah, yeah, you go on your road trip and I’ll….shelve some books.  What’s the job about, anyway?”

“Couple of people killed in a hotel that used to be the home of Lizzie Borden,”  Sam said.  “Remember her?”

“Not personally, but yeah….you think that’s your sort of job?”

“Probably not, but we don’t have any leads on Amara to be going on with, so we’re letting Sam’s serial killer fetish out to play,”  Dean informed Bobby, walking in with the last box.  “At least you got something to read while we’re gone, if you don’t want to binge-watch TV with Cas.”  His indifferent façade slipped a little as he stood regarding his foster father.  “Seriously, Bobby, please stay in the bunker while we’re gone?”

“I could come with,”  Bobby suggested.

“Nah, it’s not even going to take both of us to deal with some vengeful ghost, if it is a ghost.”

*

Bobby waited for a few moments after they were gone, half expecting to hear chaos – gunshots, shouts, demons zapping in – but there was only the silence of a deserted half century.  “Be careful, idjits,”  he muttered, mentally including Crowley in the admonition.  Then he sighed and got back to the work of unpacking and shelving the books.  Like as not this was going to be their home anyway.

The boys had said a couple of days, so he was dismayed to get the call from Sam saying they had to stay in the area a while longer.  “Thought you said ghosts were easy,”  Bobby grumbled, not wanting to admit that the bunker unsettled him, all that empty space.  He had been fine on his own in his original house, not so much in the newer cabin, but the Men of Letters bunker, not so much again.  Castiel never seemed to come out of Sam’s room, which had a television, or at least not while Bobby was awake.  The hunter wasn’t even sure the angel had registered his presence.

“Wasn’t ghosts,”  Sam said uncomfortably.  “I’m putting you on speaker, okay?  Look, it was Amara.  We didn’t expect it, but she’s been wandering around eating people’s souls, leaving them these empty husks.  It’s not like when I….didn’t come all the way back from Hell.  This guy Len, he used to be a crazy Lizzie Borden fan, but after she took his soul, he didn’t care about that, about anything.  He was like a ghost that was still alive, if that makes sense.”

Made sense, Bobby thought, but as chilling as anything else he had experienced.  He thought the account of the soulless remains which Amara left behind from her feedings even equalled the return of the dead in Sioux Falls, including his beloved wife.  Killing a loved one once was more than anyone could bear.  He did not know how to describe his mindspace now, having done it twice.  What if Karen had been living, yet morally dead inside like those people?  She would not have been able to ask him to free her.

He shivered slightly, sitting at the big kitchen table with his phone and secretly glad that the boys couldn’t see him.  “So you figure she’s still around where you are?”

“Could be,”  Dean chimed in.  “It’s the only lead we’ve got.”

“We’ll give you a call when we know something,”  Sam added.

“Any sign of you know who?”  Dean asked.

“He’s not Voldemort,”  Bobby growled, having picked up on Harry Potter references from Sam’s reading (and sharing) of the entire series.  “No.  He don’t call, he don’t write.”  He listened to the awkward silence at the other end for a too-long minute.  “Okay, don’t strain yourselves.  Call me if I can help.”  He ended the call with a feeling of relief.  “What are you doin’, Crowley?”  he asked the silence.  “Talk to me, you idjit.”

A week later, Sam and Dean came home and the walls of the illusion he had been living with, so Bobby thought of it, crumbled.

The worst part was that the boys tried to be gentle about it.  They’d been battered and bloody as was the norm after a hunt, but neither Sam nor Dean would look Bobby in the eyes as they fended off questions, saying they needed to clean up and would he mind putting a meal together?  Frustrated and worried, Bobby did that, hardly noticing what he was putting together as he fretted.   He didn’t even notice that Sam and Dean had come back into the kitchen, for a few minutes, and jumped when he heard one of them scuffle a chair behind him.

“Talk,”  he ordered, thumping plates down, glancing between the brothers, then going off to get his own rewarmed lasagna or whatever that stuff in the fridge was.  “Somethin’ bashed you both up, I can see that, but I gather it’s with its maker or you wouldn’t be reasonably intact.”

“Bobby, Crowley had Amara.”

He’d always thought people talking about emotional stabs to the heart were full of crap, but yeah, it actually did hurt.  He looked at Dean, who had spoken, saw an equal pain in his eyes.  Not for Crowley, that was sure.  “Where?”

“A deserted asylum, not Hell.  He had it staffed with his demons, only a few though.  She apparently likes eating demons as much as human souls.  We caught a guy – a demon – that Crowley had sent out to finish off the people Amara sucked dry, so they couldn’t lead anyone to her.  He’d had her under wraps since she left the house where she was a baby.  She grows, gets older, when she eats enough.”  Dean’s voice was almost flat, but he had to stop at that and Bobby understood;  the emotion was there, reined in and savage. “He figured to use her, but she – we saw her break away from him.  She stopped him killing me.”

“He wouldn’t,”  Bobby heard himself say the words, like some deluded idiot.  “He knows…”

“Knows we’re family?  Yeah.  But Bobby, if he was bluffing, he was damn good at it.  And she knocked him into a wall, forced him to back down, to swear he’d let us go.  And he keeps deals.”

“Yeah.”  Bobby stared at his plate, pushed it away.  “So she’s on the loose?”

“She just walked away.  We saw her outside, when we were in the car, like she was out for a stroll in the bad part of town.” 

“And Crowley?”

“We didn’t see him after that,”  Sam said.  “Did he call you, any time after our last call?”

Bobby shook his head numbly.  “He said he had something in Hell that would consolidate his power, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was.  And he was lying then, wasn’t he?  She wasn’t in Hell.  He might’ve been too wary to take her there – he knew she was powerful.  Look, I’m going to bed, I got to think about this.”  He walked out, got back to his room without taking note of where he was going and shut the door.  The place seemed shabby and cold.  He hadn’t made the bed and some of his clothes were tossed over the covers.  Bobby stood there staring at it, thinking of Crowley the time he’d put Bobby’s plaid shirt on over nothing, how Bobby had grabbed his phone threatening to take a revenge picture.  How Crowley had looked, that cheeky grin on his face, his dark hair uncombed and untidy, lying back on the bed and opening his legs to let Bobby see he had a hard on….”And how are you going to explain having a picture of _this_ , darling?” All that had been real.  He knew it was.  But this part of Crowley was real too; the plotting and the long view, the love of power and blood and violence.

He wanted to call him, to ask him about what Sam and Dean had said.  Or just to hear his voice.  He felt old and weary and tired of all these bloody games and secrets.  Crowley’s damned witch mother be damned; it didn’t appear that Crowley would even have known if he had walked outside and yelled, “Here I am.”  _But he gave me my legs back and he didn’t have to.  He asked to see me.  And he stayed.  But this…did he think I would be all right with it?  That because he kept this game away from me, didn’t tell me, it wouldn’t matter?_

The thoughts roiled over and over in Bobby Singer’s mind until he finally fell into an exhausted sleep.

When he woke and emerged, Dean was there alone and told him quietly that Cas had returned.  Bobby hadn’t even been aware the angel was gone.  Castiel had hunted down Metatron and shaken truth out of him, the human Metatron, then left him alive, because he didn’t matter any more.  They knew now who Amara was.  Sister of God, the Queen of Heaven mentioned in the early books of the Old Testament before she was edited out.  Like a nuclear blast, she had become a far more powerful thing than any demon in Hell could have controlled, even its King.

“Where’s Sam?”  Bobby asked dully and Dean could only say.

“He had stuff he needed to do.”

_Where’s Crowley?  Hell knows._


	3. Chapter 3

_Goddess on Earth; Amara, child-become-woman free of my control._

_You just had to follow the stink of blood and death, didn’t you, Moose?  And then you went to a witch who survived on death, giving other lives so she could extend her own, year after year, into the centuries.  You went to her even though you knew she would cheat you, because how could thirty years on Earth teach you how to compete?  You went first to save your brother and she did that for you, giving you the Darkness as collateral damage.  And then you went to Hell, to the Morningstar himself, on the strength of fever dreams and visions you believed God had sent you._

_Despite everything, you believed._

Crowley could read the agony in Sam Winchester’s eyes and part of him pitied the human, never mind the enmity he and Sam had always shared and the fact that Sam had meant to take his life for Rowena.  Even in extremis there had been that pity, as when Sam stabbed a needle into Crowley’s neck.  Now he listened in to the revelations of the Devil to his intended vessel.

That much was as per the plan; to get Sam inside and let him try to persuade Lucifer to help.  When the Cage’s foundations began to shake and shatter with the thunder of all Hell breaking apart, Crowley stared in shock as the sigils of power began to fail.  Within the bars, the Morningstar laughed.  “What’s happening?”  Crowley asked, too stunned to resent Rowena’s hand on his arm and her sudden air of command.

“Follow me, Fergus.”

And he did.

*        *        *

Bobby looked up, not entirely surprised that Dean had thrown his door open and stalked in.  He stayed propped up on his bed, but lowered the book to his chest.  “Come on in, Dean.  How was your day?”

“Oh – sorry.  I guess I should have knocked.”

“Perish the thought,”  Bobby said drily.  “I’ve been here all day so I doubt I can help you with anything.”

“Do you know where Sam is?”

“With you, I thought.”

“No, I had to – talk to somebody.  Sam was researching the church thing…”

“Amara’s latest massacre?”

“Yeah, but he’s not answering his phone.”

“Ask the angel,”  Bobby suggested.

Dean left, looking apologetic, but he didn’t actually say the words.  Bobby sighed, pushing the book away.  He didn’t really want to read.  He kept looking for Crowley and not finding him, like the only thing the King of Hell had to think about was Robert Singer.  Even the whole Amara thing, he shouldn’t have been surprised.  He’d left the demon a message on his phone, in the end, just saying “Call me.”  _Door’s open, Crowley._

Crowley didn’t answer, but he did something else.  Bobby overheard Dean answering his phone as he looked around the kitchen for something he could make into a decent dinner.  By the time Dean stormed in shouting about Sam and Crowley and the Cage, Bobby had halfway figured it out.  “Don’t you start demandin’ whether I knew,”  the older hunter warned, when Dean flung the phone down on the table.

From somewhere, Dean came back to himself enough to read Bobby’s expression; both pain and warning, and he nodded.  “I won’t.  But I have to go find him, Bobby.”

“In Hell?  How do you plan to get there?  Crowley gonna be a taxi?”

“Yeah, right.  Not exactly – there’s another way I can use, that he pointed me to.”

“What exactly did Crowley tell you?”

“Sam asked him to fix it so he could talk to Lucifer.  I helped him track Rowena down because apparently her magic was the key.”  Dean shook his head;  never one to care about the details when the goal was in sight.  “I’m not even sure why Crowley bothered to clue me in, but anyway…”

“He likes you,”  Bobby growled.  “Told you that.  Hang on a second while I grab my coat.”

“You’re _not_ coming to Hell with me!”

“Sure am.”

*        *        *

Bobby stood back, silent, while Dean went through his song and dance routine with the reaper called Billie, though part of him wanted to grin when she insisted on the song part, literally.  He studied her with interest, the new Death maybe, or just the reaper keeping tabs on the Winchester boys, when she gave something in a box to Dean and told him it was “for the limey.”  Seemed Crowley had a bit more invested than he had thought.  Well, the day Crowley didn’t have half a dozen schemes in the air, Bobby thought he might retire as a hunter.

Billie did seem pretty keen on making sure that the boys stayed dead when it happened, like they were a thorn in her particular ass or something.  And then, as easily as stepping from one flagstone to another, they passed from the human realm to Hell.

He sensed the shuddering power in the sigils she drew, and also in the reaper herself, imbuing part of her own self in those signs.  He could have drawn them, now he had seen them, but he could never have given so much of himself to them, not even if he used his hearts blood.  That was what it would take, and only for starters.

He had had no idea what to expect, as a clammy cavelike darkness closed around them and then lifted again slightly as they paused beside torches of fire thrust into holders on the walls.  Stone walls, like a traditional ancient dungeon, with steps leading down to perdition.  When his soul had come here, he had not had awareness, at first, only waking slowly to find himself in a stone-walled cell with no windows.  Beyond that, only the vague memories of being tormented by demons wearing the faces of Sam and Dean remained to him.

The place felt empty, but oppressive, as though thousands of souls were throwing themselves against the walls, trying to force themselves in.  Bobby shivered but tried not to let Dean see.  Dean wasn’t watching him in any case.  Bobby looked the same way and saw what he had expected; the black-suited King of Hell, standing alone in the corridor.  He didn’t follow Dean as he walked up to Crowley and after a brief snarky exchange, opened the box he carried so that Crowley could see what was inside.  Only then did Crowley look up at him.

“I don’t have germs, Robert.  Well, no new germs.”

“A collar to put on your mother.  Doesn’t the idea bother you just a bit?”

“Not as much as the idea of her trying to destroy my entire power structure and backstabbing me as a bonus.”

“And how about the all-powerful child you were trying to build into that power structure, that you somehow didn’t mention to me.”  Bobby had walked closer without realising how close he’d gotten.

“Child?  She was ancient before….well, before anything,”  Crowley scoffed, but there was a flicker of something in his eyes.  Bobby lost interest in fighting with him almost before it began.  It wasn’t just the fact that they were in Crowley’s realm, it was the prickles at the back of his neck that didn’t go away, the sense that chaos was right there, held back only by the demon king’s will.  If he didn’t concentrate, Bobby thought that screaming and running was very, very close to the surface.  “Well, Dean, shall we?”  Crowley asked.  He glanced at the younger hunter and turned on his heel to walk away.  Bobby went to follow and found that he could not.

“Crowley!”

“Hey, what did you do?”  Dean asked. Bobby noted that Dean did not seem bothered by Hell.  At all.  He filed that fact away for later notice.

“You shouldn’t have brought him with you,”  Crowley said, his voice flat as though he felt nothing.  “He can wait here for you until we manage to do what you’re here for….or not.  Or I can send him back up.”

“Do that,”  Dean growled. 

“Hold up,”  Bobby cut across him.  Crowley paused, hand raised theatrically, and Bobby found that he could move again.  He took a few more steps which brought him within arm’s reach of Crowley.  “Hey,”  he said awkwardly and the red flares in the demon king’s eyes settled to their more normal greenish hazel.  “I know you can’t trust me.  Nothin’ in your life ever let you know you could, so it don’t do no good for me to tell you different.  I know you’re going to help Sam get out and I thank you for that, even if Dean doesn’t.  He’s kinda got issues of his own going on.  Just remember you got somebody you can come to.  I can’t give you anything like what you’ve got here – it’s power beyond anything I can figure out, Crowley.  Anything you want, I know you can get.  And maybe you can’t imagine bein’ anything different but if you do, if you ever do….”

He had reached out his hand without thinking and touched the side of Crowley’s face, his fingers in the short beard, stroking Crowley’s cheek.  “You remember me, that’s all.  Okay, now you can zap me back, if you want to.  Outside the bunker if you don’t mind.  I feel like takin’ a walk in the open air.”

He was in that chilly air, feet planted in the soil of a winter field, before he could take another breath.  Crowley had not said a word in answer to him, he thought, though he had no idea what that meant.  But he had heard him.

*        *        *

How Castiel had ended up in the mix, down in Hell, Bobby had no idea.  None of the crew, not Dean, nor the shellshocked-looking Sam, nor Castiel himself, had much to say about how they’d ended up in the Cage and how Lucifer had defeated all of them, as though it was a game to him.  Rowena’s spell had defeated him, was all Dean told Bobby;  it had thrown the Devil back just long enough.  That Rowena had allied with Lucifer was not shocking to Bobby, nor even surprising.  It gave him an uneasy lurch inside to think how Crowley had insisted on keeping her, still trapped in the collar which allowed him to control her.  Slavery always did, whatever its form.

“Why didn’t Cas come back with you?”

“He had things he wanted to do, I guess,”  Dean said, sitting at the kitchen table with a familiar beer bottle in front of him.  Sam had gone to bed, after hugging Dean hard, and then Bobby, as though he had never expected to see either of them again.  “I’m just glad he’s feeling okay enough to do stuff, not sit in here and watch television.  If he hadn’t been able to discover that Amara survived the angels trying to destroy her, I don’t know how we’d have found out.  I was throwing up every few seconds by the time Cas found me.  Couldn’t have gone on.”

“The things we find out, eventually,”  Bobby muttered.  “Was Crowley okay, you think?  Spare me the snark, just tell me.”

“I think so.”

“Not like he was goin’ to go torture Rowena for allying with his enemy?  Set herself up to be Queen of Hell or whatever.”

“Queen of Heaven,”  Dean corrected.  “If Lucifer had gotten out – if he still does get out – I think he wants to go home.  After he does the scorched earth thing here, I guess.”

“We have got to have a proper chat with Sam when he wakes up.”

“Good luck with that.  And no, he was pretty calm, he just said she stays.  That this was the end of us teaming up to do anything.  Go home and stay out of his hair and Hell’s concerns.”

“Shit,”  Bobby murmured.  “Dean, I’ve got to get out of here.”

“Sorry?”

“I don’t mean you haven’t treated me great or anything…but I can’t live down here.  If Crowley’s got Rowena on a leash, nobody’s going to be botherin’ me.  It’s not like I want to start all over again – again – but I can find some place in Lebanon, near enough to come over here and mess around in your library.  Those books I found will be safer here.  I don’t have a good record protectin’ books, do I?  I’ll just be some old retired guy pottering around town, nothin’ anyone needs to be concerned about.”

Dean’s look was worried;  he had caught the bitterness.  “What did you say to Crowley at the end there?”  he asked quietly.  “You had his attention, I could tell that much.”

“Just come find me, if he wants to,”  Bobby said.  “Doesn’t sound like he does.”


	4. Chapter 4

Jody’s offer changed things.  She knew somebody wanting a tenant, who was happy for things to be in Jody’s name and everything to be organised through her.  Police checks and everything, though she wasn’t happy about lying on that score.  “Hell, you know more about Bobby than any other cop checking him out would discover,”  Sam said.

“Right, and I shouldn’t be signing my name to anything says he’s a reliable tenant.”

“Hey!”

“Two houses you lived in getting burned down is just a bit dodgy.”

”That wasn’t my fault,” Bobby objected.

“No, first it was Leviathan monsters and second time a witch wanting to punish her son, your demon boyfriend,”  Jody said mercilessly.  Bobby reddened, but he only looked away from the sheriff and Sam, standing outside the Sioux Falls cottage which would be his new home.  “That really would look wonderful on a reference letter.”

The house was fine; a brown brick bungalow with two bedrooms, only ten or fifteen minutes walk from Jody’s place.  The landlord, an ex-colleague of Jody’s, had just moved out of town for a new job and Bobby hadn’t even met the guy.  Part of him was glad, on a deep level, to be moving home, even if it wasn’t _his_ house; part was a little dubious at the idea Jody might be keeping tabs on him, along with those feral teenaged girls she was caring for.  Bobby hadn’t been along on the boys’ last run this way, a few weeks ago now, but he had heard the sad story from the boys.  At least Alex and Claire were getting along a bit better now, Jody had said.

He caught Sam and Jody looking at one another as though exchanging information and muttered under his breath.  At least Dean wasn’t here.  He was busy on something or other and it had been left to Sam to ride shotgun, since Bobby’s truck was currently not roadworthy.  The younger Winchester had been upfront in saying he wouldn’t be comfortable letting Bobby drive to South Dakota on his own and Bobby had humoured him.  Sam had a way of looking at you that got you doing that and anyway, he appreciated the company.

Sam hadn’t talked much during the drive, but given what little they’d told him about their recent time in Hell, Bobby couldn’t exactly blame him.  He still couldn’t get his mind around the idea of Lucifer maybe being the solution to the Darkness.  _No_ , Sam had said, _he won’t help.  He was messing with me all along.  I think if he got free, he’d cheer her on, use her for his own ends and then bring on the apocalypse we interrupted._

If.  Rowena was good for that much, Bobby thought; her spell had held in the end.  The boys got free, Cas too and I’m clear of that burrow.  That’s as close to good news as we ever get, so why the hell am I so twitchy, waitin’ for the other shoe to drop?  He wanted to call Crowley, though the demon hadn’t answered any of his calls so far and Bobby knew it was stupid to keep doing it.  Sam came over to him then. “I’m going to get going,”  he said.  “You need anything before I go?”

“No.  I’m fine.”

“Call soon, let me know you’re all right.”

“I will.”

Jody came over as well.  “I’ve got to head home before Claire and Alex burn it down…sorry.  You know what I mean.  Why don’t you come for dinner in a few nights, meet the girls?  Claire’s dying to ask you about hunting and I want you to totally discourage her.”

“Might be a bit late for that,”  Bobby said, without promising anything.  Jody sighed, kissed his cheek lightly and headed towards her patrol car.

“I’ll bring your truck over when Dean’s had a look at it.  You could have stayed a few more days, you know.”

“Yeah, I know.”  Bobby managed a grin.  “This way I can put in a grocery order as well.  Bring some rotgut.”

Once Sam was gone, he headed inside and strolled slowly around, though he had already done that with Jody and Sam earlier.  The house had basic furniture, all that he needed, but Crowley would criticise.  Crowley would like the place, he thought; it was certainly newer than the house at Singer Salvage, designed on an open plan with large windows to showcase the trees and the open air. 

*

His memories of Karen seemed to help him with the gradual transformation of the house over the next few days.  Bobby thought he could sense her guiding him in choices of furnishings, bed linen, even crockery and gadgets that might appeal to a finicky demon….or man.  It felt weird that nothing happened, in the way of attacks or weirdness.  He even visited Jody, three evenings later, and wrangled the two teenagers.  Claire did indeed interrogate him for hunting stories, though Bobby felt a bit odd talking to her and knowing that she was the daughter of Castiel’s vessel.  Alex was another story.  The girl raised by vampires was observant and uncertain, never pushing herself forward, watching everyone for cues.

Jody said this one was doing well in school now, whereas Claire had dropped out and was concentrating on lore and physical training.  Bobby didn’t say so to Jody, but he though the two would do well as partners and hunters, in a few years time.  She must have picked up some of his feelings though.

“You were too damn helpful,”  the sheriff accused Bobby, going out to his truck with him after dinner.  “Did you have to tell her all that about gun training and the best guns for someone of her build?”

“You want her to break her wrists?”

“I want her to have a normal life.  Alex too.”

“There’s a lot of people living normal lives.  Not too many hunters.”

“Are you still a hunter, Bobby?  You and your demon.”

“He’s not mine,”  Bobby growled.  “And yeah, I’m still a hunter.  I don’t have to be permanently on the road to prove it.”

“And your partner is the King of Hell,”  Jody said quietly.

“Get off me, Jody.  I don’t even know if he’s my partner any more – he’s just gone.  Sam and Dean have seen more of him than I have and the last was he doesn’t want any more team ups with the likes of us.”

“That’s the Winchesters,”  Jody said, giving him a gentle poke in the ribs.  “Not you.  I saw his face when he looked at you, Bobby.  He cares about you.  Come on, what are you embarrassed about?”

Bobby wanted to say nothing, but he could feel his face heating up and cursed fair colouring.  More than six decades old and he was blushing.  Yet part of him wanted to admit it, to have a chance to actually talk about Crowley to somebody.  Somebody who knew what he was, what he had been, and yet had forgiven him.  He tried to cover by getting into the driver’s seat and then reluctantly wound down the window as Jody continued to lean against the truck, watching him.

“He don’t want me, Jody, not now.  He’s got Hell.  We sorted out the Lucifer thing so he don’t have to worry about that, and I doubt he cares what Amara does, not really.”

Jody had a look on her face that made Bobby think of somebody trying to sort something out in her mind.  “I’ve got a feeling….I don’t know.  I haven’t got my mind around all that stuff the boys said about Hell, what Hell is, but it seemed too easy.  This demon….”

“Angel.  Lucifer is an angel.”

“Arsehole,”  Jody said firmly.  “He beat the pants of Sam, Dean _and_ Castiel and then this spell belatedly kicks in and Lucifer fucks off.  Right?”

“Yeah, except the whole appearance of the Cage was part of the spell, the idea that it’s this barred cell is just a construct, so what Rowena actually did was dissolve the concept…”

“No!”  Jody made a motion as though to go for her gun and Bobby raised his hands in apology.  “You know what I mean.  Now, he can’t just take a body, you said…”

“No, because he’s an angel,”  Bobby reiterated.  “It’s in their rules.  Demons can just overpower you but no matter how much of a bastard he is, Lucifer had to ask.  Has to ask.”

“So either this very unlikely thing happened, with Rowena’s spell, or your perp got what he wanted,”  Jody said, shrugging.  “You’ve been around Sam and Dean.  I imagine you’d know if one of them….wasn’t them?”  Bobby nodded, without elaboration.  “Castiel took off right afterwards and hasn’t been around since, except for brief meetings.  I’d wonder about that, if I was you.”

“Castiel’s dead against Lucifer escaping,”  Bobby said.  “There’s no way he would just let Lucifer take him over.”

“Okay.  I’m just putting it out there.”  Jody rapped the roof of the truck and smiled at Bobby.  “Thanks for coming.  Please tell some worse stories next time and as for Crowley, if you want to talk to him, why don’t you play by his rules?”

“’Scuse me?”

“He’s a demon so he has to answer a legitimate summons, according to the Winchesters.  Or did he change his number when he got promoted?”

“That’s stalking.”

“Just putting it out there,”  Jody said again, rolling her eyes as she moved away from the truck.  Bobby sighed as he put it into gear and drove slowly away.  Should have just walked over, he told himself.  Keep up the exercise.  But the old wariness, the wanting to make sure he had a vehicle for quick exits or chases, that was the stronger thing.

It was why he reached his own house in a couple of minutes rather than a quarter of an hour, in time to see something blackened and bloody fall out of a split in the air.  He’d left no lights on and only the streetlight made a theatre-circle of his front lawn where the form – the person? – fell out of void into reality.

It was followed by two other forms who proceeded to lay into the first one, at least for the moment before Bobby was able to get out of his truck and go to the attack, pulling his sanctified water pistol out of his coat pocket.  The first demon screamed and vanished as soon as the holy water struck her, the second bared teeth and came for the attack.  It took Bobby all of two minutes to drive him back with the water, long enough to rattle off the exorcism into the thing’s ear and see the body fall limp on his front lawn.  Just lucky that the truck hid the whole thing from the neighbours.  He hoped.

It wasn’t like the police would put any stock in a report that he was a crazed murderer.

Only then could he look at what they had followed and attacked and recognise, under the smeared blood, that it was Crowley.  The demon screamed as Bobby lifted him, not from the holy water, though his cheek steamed, but from the effect of demon-inflicted wounds.  “Robert, Lucifer is free,”  Crowley said, the hoarse voice only a husk of itself.  “Castiel is his vessel.  _Lucifer killed my mother_.”   The last words disappeared in terrible, coughing sounds as the King of Hell cried his grief into Bobby Singer’s shoulder.  Bobby’s first thought was _Now everybody’s going to see me cuddling a man!_   Instantly ashamed of himself, he tried to find somewhere to hold on to Crowley that wasn’t cut up, but there was so much blood on Crowley’s clothes that he gave up and instead got him inside as quickly as he could.

“Been a while….since I was on the racks,”  Crowley coughed.

For the first time, Bobby was thankful that this house didn’t have stairs.  He could get Crowley into the bathroom with relative ease, or at least not much twinging from his back.   He tossed a couple of towels on the floor to catch the blood still seeping from Crowley, or smeared on his feet, then helped him to sit on the closed lid of the toilet and kneeling beside him to examine the damage.  “Can we expect any more visitors, first off?”

“Don’t know,”  Crowley croaked.  “This trip wasn’t exactly my idea.  Lucifer _threw_ me out of Hell, Bobby.  I was able to….pick the spot where I ended up, is all.”

That made Bobby look up to meet Crowley’s eyes.  “Looked more like they were tryin’ to kill you than dump you.”

“Lucifer said….I was fair game.  They tortured me first and I broke free, managed to kill several demons, but those two were able to come after me,”  Crowley choked.  He was still crying, not trying to hide it at all as Bobby tugged gently at his ruined shirt.  No coat, no tie…whatever had gone down had nearly killed Crowley, he thought.  “C’mon, let’s get these things off and I’ll run you a bath.  You may have to settle for wearin’ some plaid,”  he added, over the demon’s sobs and further choked words about “ _He killed my mother!_ ”

Bobby managed to ignore this until he had Crowley’s clothes off him and helped him into the lukewarm bath he had drawn, fearful that hot water would be too painful.  He had to see what damage was under the blood, though, and the demon seemed to understand this, grimacing but cooperating as he settled down into the bath, the water lapping around his waist.  With a washcloth, the hunter carefully wiped the blood from Crowley’s face.  “Crowley,”  he said carefully, “about Rowena….I don’t understand.”  _Leave out the fact that she abandoned you and you hated her._   “She was a witch, she died in Hell and she’s sure not gonna leave it.  But her soul is there and if I ever saw someone who’d make a better demon, well, there’d only be a very few.  Once we sort this out…”  _Yeah, put Lucifer back in his box.  Again.  That’s all._   “Once you’re back where you belong, you can fast track her, anything you want.  You haven’t lost her if you don’t want.”

Heavy bruising and cuts was all, Bobby deduced with gentle hands running over Crowley’s body.  The demons had probably been playing, as their kind saw it.  Even the two who’d come topside after Crowley probably hadn’t intended to kill him, or not at once.  Crowley cried out only once when Bobby gently prodded his side and affirmed when Bobby asked him if it hurt to breathe.  Broken rib, maybe more than one, that was all.

“Robert,”  Crowley said, “you haven’t noticed something.”  No snark now;  his hazel-green eyes were fixed on Bobby’s face, intent, pleading.  Bobby’s large, calloused hand rested against Crowley’s cheek as he studied him, trying to work it out.  “I’m not healing.  Not demonic healing.  I’m not sure I’m a demon at all now.  I want you to run the tests, all the ones you do to find out whether someone is human.”

“When you’re better,”  Bobby said.  “You’re healin’, even if you’re doing it at human pace.  Now come on, I’ve got some pants you can wear.  Better leave a shirt off for now, give those cuts a chance to breathe.  Nice and slow now.”  He helped Crowley to stand and get out of the bath.

“I hurt all over!”

“Welcome back to humanity, if that’s what’s happened,”  Bobby told him.  “Come on, you’re goin’ to bed for a bit…alone!”

Crowley climbed painfully into Bobby’s bed, after being ordered to sit and stay put while the hunter changed the sheets.  Despite being one body-sized ache, he was already feeling better.  So good to be clean and topside, seeing moonlight through the window….and the line of salt carefully laid along the building’s opening.  He wanted to know, he truly did, whether Lucifer had actually returned him to human, but maybe Bobby was right and the testing didn’t have to be right now.

“Robert.”  His hand closed on Bobby’s wrist as the hunter helped him settle.  “Stay with me.  I’ll behave!”

“That’ll be the day,”  Bobby’s rumble was comforting by his ear.  “Too early for me yet, I’m gonna go make you some tea and get somethin’ for myself and just check everything’s secure.”

“You have to call the Winchesters.”  Crowley’s voice now was resigned.  “They probably need to know what’s going on.”

“You think?”  Bobby gingerly patted his shoulder.  “You get some rest.  I’ll make the tea.”

“Leave the tea bag in for at least three minutes, Robert,”  Crowley murmured, his eyes already closing.  “Just a dash of honey, no sugar.”


	5. Chapter 5

Crowley woke so suddenly that he heard himself gasp aloud.  He remembered where he was, no trouble about that.  Being quick on that sort of uptake was a basic survival skill for a demon;  not that his kind slept often.  They _could_ , but they didn’t do so unless they were very fatigued or very secure.  A glance at the window showed him pearly grey light of early morning, so he had slept through the night, with no one coming after him.  Surely a plus, though he couldn’t believe Lucifer had really let him go, not with his store of knowledge.

The Morningstar might be ancient in power, but he had not had much chance to get himself up to date with the current state of humanity  That, coupled with an arrogance Crowley found simply breathtaking – and not in a sexy way – had seen him trapped before and would again, Crowley promised himself.  But for now, he could forget arrogance, couldn’t he?  Crowley looked around the rather ordinary confines of Bobby Singer’s bedroom, the way the early streaks of sun showed up the dust, the pile of bedtime reading on the small table, some of the hunter’s clothes thrown over a chair.  For a new resident, he thought, Bobby could definitely imprint on a house.

“Hey,” said the resident himself, from the doorway.  Crowley felt a warmth in his chest, a sensation usually alien to him.  He turned to smile at the hunter, who came forward, a mug in his hands.  “You were asleep before the kettle boiled last night, so I thought I’d bring you this now.”  He passed Crowley the mug with care before sitting on the side of the bed.  “How do you feel?”

“Hurts.”

Bobby drew the sheet back so he could see and made a sympathetic ouching sound.  Crowley’s chest and arms were covered with dark, purpling and yellow bruises colourful enough to rival his dragon tattoos.

“Yeah, I bet.  This is probably the worst of it.  I’m not gonna bandage your ribs, I think it’ll hurt you worse if I do.  I’ll get you some painkillers, see if they take care of it enough.  How’s your breathing?”

“I’m still doing it,”  Crowley said drily.

“And he’s back,”  Bobby noted, grinning at him.  “You drink your tea;  I’ll be back with the pills.”  Crowley watched him leave and turned his attention to the tea with an unaccustomed sense of contentment.  The tea was quite good, he thought, but that wasn’t all of it.  He was finding that he loved the fussing over; something totally new to him.  It marked a certain shift in their relationship, from King of Hell and ageing hunter to something more…equal.

Bobby came back with a glass of water and the promised pills.  “Don’t know how ibuprofen will work on you, but it’ll help with inflammation, I hope.  You ought to eat something before you take them; you hungry?”  Crowley shook his head.  “Let me rephrase that; if I make you something, will you eat it?”

“Of course, Bobby.”

Bobby blinked at the quiet tone.  “Well, uh, good.  Scrambled eggs on the way.”

After breakfast and painkillers, Crowley felt eased enough to get up.  Bobby allowed him as far as the living room and settled him in a chair, then pulled his own chair close by and drank coffee while pretending not to watch the demon.  “I warded the house this mornin’ before I brought you your tea, just to make sure.  Some spells Sam found in that bunker, he called ‘em I’m-Not-Here sigils.  So long as you stay inside, no one’s going to have a clue where to find you, and since I’ve only been here a short time, good chance I’m not on anything’s radar yet.”

“Did you talk to the Winchesters about me coming here?”

“Not yet.  I tried last night but no answers, so they could be busy or just not awake yet.  I left a coupla messages.”

Crowley nodded slightly.  “Those tests…”

“Can wait,”  Bobby said gruffly.  His hand found Crowley’s shoulder without his conscious volition, touching lightly in respect for the injuries.  Crowley sighed and leaned his head closer towards the hunter, who stroked his hair with a gentleness some would find surprising, though his eyes held a troubled expression all the while.  “Okay if I, uh, give you a hug?”

“Of course, Robert.  You think I’ve never had a bit of torture?”

Bobby muttered, carefully settling his arms around Crowley, who leaned against his chest and closed his eyes.  “You know, probably better if you don’t casually refer to torture like everybody knows about it?  When I introduce you to anyone, that is.  Not like I get a lot of visitors, but the boys will drop around and it’s possible Jody will.”

“They know,”  Crowley whispered.  “Jody knows, because of me.”

The hug tightened and he felt sharp pains in his torso, but said nothing about it to the hunter.  Bobby eased his grip with a sigh.  “I got some things to do around the place, but I’ll be nearby.  You sit and let those ribs mend, or if your magic’s recovered, well, I won’t tell you what to do in that case.  But one thing I’d better ask you.  Those demons that followed you, we took ‘em out.  Any way they could have reported back on your whereabouts?”

“No, love.  That would require a bowl of fresh human blood…”

“Which they didn’t exactly have time to acquire.  Good, for so many reasons.  But I’m not convinced Lucifer don’t know where you are, or can’t work it out.”

“He _is_ an archangel,”  Crowley said.  “I am putting you in danger.”  He began to stand, but Bobby’s arms didn’t shift from around him and held him in place.  The King sighed.

“Okay,”  Bobby said.  “Do something for me?”  Crowley made an inquiring sound.  Bobby got up from his chair, letting him go, and walked across the room, turning when he got to the door.  “Let me see how you’re walking.”

“It’s a couple of little broken ribs, Robert, not broken legs,”  Crowley scoffed, but he got up, not without wincing, and began to walk slowly but steadily over to Bobby.  He got most of the way and then seemed to run into an invisible wall.  It was right in front of the hunter, who looked at him thoughtfully for a moment and then moved a foot to scuff at the rug underfoot.

“Devil’s trap,”  Crowley said, his voice flat.  He wasn’t sure how he felt.  He had been a demon so long that humanity was a distant memory, but he had been getting himself used to the idea that Lucifer might have changed him back, as a way of making him suffer more before he died.  He had certainly cut Crowley off from Hell and nullified his powers.  _I can fix that_ , Crowley told himself.  _Kill enough and I would be able to restore my abilities._   There was, of course, the problem of not having demonic strength or telekinesis or any of the useful knacks.  Still, the Winchesters certainly seemed to manage.

He felt arms around him and the solid pressure of Bobby’s chest, then the hunter’s lips touching his cheek.  Thoughts of bloody mayhem slid away from Crowley’s mind with that contact, even though Bobby had no idea how to help him.  Probably thought it was good that Crowley seemed to be more human, even if he still had demonic, ah, issues.

*        *        *

Over the following several days, the demon who had been the King of Hell slowly healed, both physically and mentally, though the latter scars were going to take a lot longer.  With Bobby, he knuckled down to the study of the signs which might give them a clue what Lucifer was up to in the world.  There, Crowley’s immense store of knowledge and demonically acute memory – the only things not affected by Lucifer – could be brought to bear.  He could examine the most devastating world tragedies;  natural disasters, the collateral damage of wars, any horrors at all, with equanimity, and regarding all of it he told Bobby, “No.  Nothing to do with Lucifer.”

“You sure?”  Bobby asked uncomfortably, staring at video of suffering civilians caught up in the Syrian civil war.  “This stuff is fucking medieval.”

“Exactly.  Been here a long time, love.  You just never got to see it before, but modern technology brings it right to your living room as it happens.  Romance isn’t dead, it’s just been given technicolor highlights.”

Bobby was also worried because he had heard so little from Sam and Dean.  After three or four days of trying, he did manage to speak to Sam, who sounded drained and depressed, but said, “Fine,” when Bobby asked him how they were.  He would, however, not be drawn on when he and Dean would be able to visit Bobby and the hunter was reluctant to say anything about Crowley over the line, or any medium that was not face to face.  Nor did Sam ask.  When Bobby asked how Castiel was doing, there was a long pause and then Sam said, “Better save that till we see you.”

“Yeah, and when’s that going to be?  I know I sound like your cranky uncle in the nursing home here, but come on, Sam.”

“Soon, Bobby.  That’s all I can say.”

Bobby clicked the phone shut and looked over at Crowley, who was in the armchair next to him, as had become their habit in the evenings after supper.  He was much changed from the being he had been, at least outwardly.  He was wearing tan trousers and a soft green sweater.  His dark hair was meticulously cut, as was his beard, but he was definitely more relaxed, Bobby thought, though he was still merciless about Bobby’s sense of style.  Not, the hunter thought with an inner grin, that anybody wearing fuzzy pink slippers as part of his home evening attire had a leg to stand on there.

They had started to go out, at least for supplies, and for Crowley to get some clothes and the haircut, but Bobby at least was mostly content to stay close to home.  And to Crowley. 

“What is it, love?”  Crowley asked.

 _That_ , Bobby thought.  _You were….are…King of Hell and you’re here bein’ domestic with me.  And that feels like the best thing in the world_.  Crowley was still looking at him inquiringly.  “Feel like an early night, darling?”  he asked, with that smile that indicated sleep was the last thing on his mind. 

Bobby opened his mouth, lost his nerve just as fast and nodded.

“Let’s go to bed then, love,”  Crowley said, his rough voice as soft as he could make it.  Bobby nodded, and let Crowley haul him to his feet.  They had not resumed relations yet due to Crowley’s rib damage – not that the demon hadn’t wanted to, saying pain was nothing new – but Bobby had flat out said no way.  He was mildly surprised to realise, after a couple of nights, that he was missing it too.  Now, he settled into bed beside Crowley, who leaned close to kiss him and propped his elbows on Bobby’s chest, half sprawled over him, skin to skin. 

“You know, there’s something about Lucifer none of you have considered,”  he commented.  Bobby grunted something wordless, knowing Crowley wouldn’t be able to resist showing his cleverness and also, a bit distracted by Crowley’s semi-hardness pressing against him.

“I’ve picked up how bloody impatient you and your boys are about where is he, why haven’t we seen any signs, is he going to take on Amara, why haven’t we noticed anything of _her_ around the place.”

“All true, I guess,”  Bobby conceded.  “So?”

“He’s immortal, darling, and so is the bootylicious Darkness.  Either or both of them could wait several human lifetimes to carry out their plans, by which time there will be no one alive who has a clue.”

Bobby wanted to point to the Men of Letters, to their vast storehouse of knowledge, but he knew despite that, Crowley was right.  If nothing happened for years and years, what they’d learned about Amara and Lucifer would be lost and no one would remember where to find anything about them.  There might be hunters dedicated enough to dig for that information, but he wondered.  It didn’t look as though Sam or Dean was going to leave any offspring, by blood or adoption, and he sure wasn’t.  True, there was Castiel, as immortal as the rest, but there was no guaranteeing he would still be on Earth, or care if he was.  That left pure random chance, and Bobby didn’t believe in that sort of luck.

“I bet Lucifer went stir crazy in that Cage,”  he said slowly.  “You think he’ll have that kind of patience now he’s free?”

“Yes,” said the King of Hell simply, as he sank down on to Bobby’s chest.  The hunter wrapped his muscular arms carefully around him, seeking to comfort by simple closeness and warmth, and also obtain what ease he could.  What Crowley said made sense, but Bobby had witnessed Sam and Dean’s interactions with Lucifer before – as Crowley had not – and he wasn’t sure that Crowley was correct.  There was a childishness and a vindictiveness about Lucifer which made Bobby think that he wouldn’t be able to resist coming after his human, mortal enemies.

“How’re your ribs doing?”  he murmured a bit later, but all he got in answer was a slight snore.

“Oh, you gotta be kidding me.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter takes place after the time travelling submarine and the werewolves, but "Safe House" does not happen in this timeline.

Even over the phone, Sam Winchester sounded cagey, Bobby thought, like a kid who had been breaking bounds and wasn’t going to admit it even in the face of almost certain proof the adults knew about it.  He didn’t sound any better than he had when Bobby had talked to him before;  if anything, he sounded as though he had been ill and that scared Bobby more than he ever wanted to admit.  The older hunter wanted to grab Sam by the scruff and demand he and Dean came clean about what they’d been into and what had happened to Castiel.

“You sound like crap, Sam,”  he commented after another long pause.  “What the hell have you and Dean been up to?”

_“Hunting werewolves.”_

“For a month?”

_“No.  Just last week.  Before that there was some stuff…..involving a submarine.”_

“A submarine.  Not many of those hereabouts,”  Bobby commented dryly, noting Crowley stopping to listen, his brows rising.  “Landlocked state and all that.  Look, I didn’t just call to discuss your health, or my health, for that matter.  We need to get together and talk – you boys, Castiel, me and my housemate, concerning the circumstances in which he’s my housemate again and details of which I’m not gonna talk about on the fricking phone.   Did I say we needed to talk about Castiel?”  Still awkward silence.  Bobby sighed.  “So if you don’t want my housemate in your place, then you and Dean can get your asses over here!”

He ended the call, glowering at the phone.  “Liked it better when you could slam one of these in the receiver,”  he muttered, dropping it on the desk.  Crowley came over and Bobby, still sitting,  wound an arm around his middle without even thinking about it, leaning his cheek against the demon’s side.

“Getting protective of me, aren’t you, love,”  Crowley teased him.  “It doesn’t matter if they hate me, Robert, most people do.”  He sounded quite serious, which jolted Bobby.  “They do have reason.”

Bobby couldn’t think of a thing to say to that.  It was true.  A demon was evil, selfishness incarnate, controlled only by higher demons and the threat of pain.  Crowley had begun to be different, but how much was still uncertain.  He could love, Bobby knew it, but how much was he demon now?  He stood still within Bobby’s hold.  The hunter leaned back, letting his hand fall away from Crowley.

“Witch son, demon spawn,”  Crowley said, his rough voice soft.  “That’s me, love.  You shouldn’t care about me, it’s hazardous to your mental health.”

“Let me worry about that,”  Bobby growled.  “I don’t hate you.  Dean don’t hate you.”

He stopped, surprised at himself.  Crowley raised one eyebrow, Spock-like.  “Dean?  Squirrel been confiding in you, Robert?”

“No.  I dunno why I said that.  But they’ll come around.  They need you to help with Lucifer and Amara.  You know things.”

“Connections,”  Crowley agreed drily.  “But Lucifer wiped the floor with me, love, almost literally.  Turned my demons against me, not that those mooks need much turning.  And killed Rowena, when that was supposed to be my job!”

Bobby got to his feet, faced him and reached out a hand to gently tap his forehead.  “We need what’s in here, Crowls.”

“Crowls?”

“You got all these words for me, all I got is Crowley.”

“Isn’t that enough for you, darling?”

“You are way too much for anybody,”  Bobby said.  He grinned at Crowley in the surprised silence which greeted his remark, thinking that it was a rare occasion indeed when anyone got the last word with the demon.  Given the grim situation they were in, you definitely had to take your entertainment where you could.

*

The Winchesters showed up two days later.  Both looked like they had been in recent fights, Bobby thought, studying the bruises and general messed-up faces.  Werewolves could explain a lot, but not the tension and dread that ghosted behind their eyes.   He’d seen men on their feet after illness or wounds which had nearly killed them, who looked like that.  It made him a bit more careful with his hugs, even to Sam, who’d been taller and broader across the shoulders than him for nearly fifteen years.

“Neutral ground in here,”  Bobby said, gesturing at his house behind him.  “All right?”

“What’s wrong with Crowley?”  Sam asked.

“I didn’t say anything was wrong with him.”

“Well, last we knew, he stayed in Hell after Rowena opened the Cage for us to talk to Lucifer,”  Sam said.  A few words, to describe the convoluted dealings of the past few weeks, Bobby thought, but all that was needed between them.   He wasn’t about to demand any admissions out here, where anything on earth or visiting could listen in.

“Inside,”  he said gruffly, and they followed him.  The place was as well warded as he and Crowley had been able to do, and he saw the Winchesters feel it as they passed over the threshold and within the protections.  Safe, Bobby hoped, from the prying eyes of demons or the cold, merciless, mocking power of Lucifer, within the shell of the only angel who had ever been a friend to him and the boys, as confused by humanity as he so often was.  Sam and Dean were close behind him as he went into the living room, where Crowley was waiting.  Dark suited and formal once again.  Battle armour, the hunter thought.

Crowley stood; an unexpected courtesy, or perhaps he didn’t want to be caught napping, Bobby thought.  Sam’s look at him was full of distrust and wariness, but from Dean there was a quick meeting of eyes and a slight nod from both the young hunter and the King of Hell.  “Squirrel, Moose,”  Crowley said genially.  “What a pleasure to see you both.”

Bobby sighed.  He had taken the opportunity the day before to ask – damn near plead with – Crowley not to needle Sam and Dean when they got there.  “We need you, but you need us too,”  he’d said.  “And it’s not like it’s hard to stir either of ‘em up, so please don’t…just this once?  Look at this way, if you’re nice, they’re gonna go crazy tryin’ to figure out what your angle is.” 

Now, as Sam and Dean looked at one another with wtf expressions, Bobby walked over to Crowley and put a hand on his shoulder.  “I asked you to hold off winding them up,”  he said, “not to coat ‘em with honey.  Boys, Crowley has a story to tell you ‘bout how he arrived here this time.  And maybe you’ve got one for me about why Castiel is not on the scene at the moment.  I’m going to get us some beers.”

“Cas said yes to Lucifer,”  Dean said in a rush, as though he was afraid he would change his mind about saying it.  Bobby, who had barely had time to take a step, stopped.  Sam nodded soberly.  “We’re gonna get him back.”

“Cas had the right to make that choice,”  Sam muttered.

“Hold up,”  Bobby growled, feeling like a referee in a soccer match among kindergarteners.  “Crowley, your turn.  What happened when the boys and I left Hell?”

“I saw Lucifer,”  Crowley said, looking at nothing as though he saw the Morningstar before him again.  “In Castiel, stalking into my throne room as though he owned it.  Rowena greeted him and he asked her whether anyone else had the power and knowledge to do what she’d done in opening the cage.  She told him no.  He snapped her neck.”  His voice, rough and low, became harsher, nearly betraying grief before he regained control of himself.

“Rowena’s dead?”  Sam asked.

“Well, I didn’t see her getting up again before I was hauled out of there and shoved into a dog kennel,”  Crowley snarled.  “Lucifer put me on display before my Court and when he grew tired of me, he dragged me out of the kennel and threw me into the ether….never mind, it’s a concept beyond your meat brains to follow…but I emerged bloody and blackened outside Bobby’s house, with my own demons on my heels set to tear me into bloody gobbets.”  He waited but neither Winchester said anything.  “If it wasn’t for Bobby I would be dead.  Since that time I’ve been cut off from Hell.  I can’t travel there.  I’m not sure I can teleport at all, to be honest, which I don’t know much about.  I seem to be susceptible to the usual demonic…allergies but my powers are not happening.  Nor am I healing as a demon should. Bobby has done some tests but there’s no real explaining it, unless your texts in the Men of Letters library have something.  I think Lucifer has Hell in his hand and he has cancelled my membership.  Whether I’m still a demon or not….we aren’t sure, but Bobby doesn’t seem to want to test thoroughly.  I don’t figure either of you would have that problem.”  His voice was casual, almost indifferent, and Bobby choked back an angry response.  Damn it, Crowley was right.  He, Bobby, had held back for fear of hurting him.  What a thing was that to admit to other hunters?  Yet as he looked at his boys, Bobby was surprised, even touched, to see a certain sympathy there, even towards Crowley.

“But you know lore, don’t you, from centuries in Hell?”  Dean asked the King.

“If there’s a way to disrupt what Lucifer did to me, it would be a tad useful if I could help with the mindless violence, Squirrel.”  If he didn’t know them both so well, Bobby thought, he would have thought that was actual gratitude in Crowley’s look towards Dean.  Nah.  Couldn’t be.

“What tests did you do on Crowley?”  Sam asked into the awkward quiet.  “Same one you do on all your visitors?”

“Only the ones I think might not be themselves,”  Bobby muttered.  “And no, just the demon trap an’ that worked so I didn’t think I needed to keep goin’.  Garglin’ holy water ain’t healthy if you’re a demon.  I thought…”

“I see what you mean,”  Sam said to Crowley.  “Okay.  I have an idea.”  His brother, Bobby and Crowley looked at him blankly.  “Dean, you and Bobby are going to take a drive to pick up those things from the store that Bobby forgot to get.”

“What things?”  Bobby demanded.

“You’ll think of them on your way to the store.”  Dean, responding to that wordless communication he so easily shared with Sam, put an arm around the older hunter and half guided, half pushed him towards the front door.  “Take at least an hour, Dean.”

“Got it.”

In the silence after the front door shut off Bobby’s protestations, Sam and Crowley looked at one another.  “Why an hour, Moose?”

“Just in case,”  Sam said, reaching for a hip flask out of his coat pocket.  He handed it to Crowley.  “Take a small swig.  Sit down first.”

Slowly, Crowley did, then made a grimace and raised the flask to his lips.  He sipped briefly.  “Not the best vintage. I….” and broke off, eyes going wild and red as the words became an agonised choking sound.  Sam, who had splashed many of Crowley’s kind with the aforesaid “vintage,” had never actually seen what happened when a demon drank holy water.  He could swear smoke had flowed out of Crowley’s mouth.  Reddish smoke, like the demon himself, but a weaker red, breaking up as he watched.  Blood turned to a gas, he wondered, as Crowley continued to dry retch, bent down like someone in the crash position on an airline.  He checked the time, then sat back.

“Gods below,”  Crowley finally said.  He sat up and gingerly leaned back.  “You just going to watch me if I croaked, Moose?”

“There wasn’t anything I could think of to do if you did,”  Sam admitted.  “There’s a lot of lore on killing demons but not so much on what you do to, um, take it back.”

“Thanks ever so,”  Crowley muttered.  He touched his throat warily, half expecting to find it the bloody ruin the acidic pain had suggested.  “Well, as Bobby says, the devil’s trap stopped me dead and maybe we should’ve accepted that as enough proof.  Trust Lucifer to leave me with the allergies but not the powers.  Any ideas on that front?”

“What have you tried to do, other than teleport?”

“Heal,”  Crowley snapped.  “I tried to create a few little flames to see if that worked, tried to levitate a coffee mug, knock a cockroach into the wall…all those efforts got me was a headache.”

“How about stuff like eating and sleeping; you doing those?”

“More than usual,”  Crowley admitted reluctantly.  “Robert keeps wanting to feed me, and usually human food wouldn’t help me at all, but I do admit I feel better when I eat.  That’s what got me wondering whether the trials, the humanity thing, was still in me, even though I got rid of the blood-drinking thing.”

“Have you still got injuries from when Lucifer booted you?”  Crowley nodded and Sam gestured to him.  “Can I see?”

Only a glare this time, no comments as Crowley stripped off his coat and unbuttoned his shirt, which he folded neatly over a chair next to his tie.  Sam came closer, scrutinising his torso with the care of a doctor.  “You got burned by your demons…..these marks around here?  And here, is this where the ribs were broken?”  He indicated Crowley’s side, not quite touching him, and not even remarking on the bright dragon tattoos decorating upper arms and chest.  “Two weeks ago?”

“Around that.  Bit longer.”

Sam’s finger dug in suddenly and Crowley jumped, swearing. “Fuck me!”

“No thanks.  That hurt?”

“No, Moose, mere theatrics!  Yes, it hurt.  I applaud your accuracy.  Are we done?”

Sam looked at him thoughtfully, as the demon, not getting a verbal reply, reached for the black shirt and began pulling it on.  “Crowley?”  He stepped closer, his height enabling him to see what he wanted to without needing to ask Crowley to bend his head.  “Hold still.”  Crowley was still asking what for when Sam closed fingers on his target and yanked.  Crowley yelped.

“You are so lucky I can’t blast you into a wall right now,”  Crowley snapped.  “Why are you pulling my hair out?”  For answer Sam displayed his flattened palm and the strands of hair lying across it.  Crowley peered closer, for once shaken out of a sarcastic retort.  “Grey hairs.  Since when do I have grey hairs?”

“You tell me.  You do have them in your beard,”  Sam said, waiting for his nod, “but I couldn’t remember seeing them in your hair.  You’re the only demon I’ve known whose meatsuit was of an age where you might have a few, so I wasn’t sure.  Come to that, I’ve never known a demon over a length of time where he or she might show signs of ageing…”

“You wouldn’t, Moose,”  Crowley cut him off.  “The meatsuit stays at the age when we take it, there are certain alterations, if it’s one we intend to keep.  After awhile, we generally move on, of course, but we like that to be at a time of our choosing.”

“The human style healing,”  Sam said quietly, “that suggests human style ageing.  It’s not just your powers that get blocked if you’re cut off from Hell, it’s demonic immortality.”

“So what in hell – or out of Hell – am I?”  He was horrified to find himself almost pleading, and looked to see whether Sam Winchester was mocking him.

“I think you’re what you thought, a demon without powers, but if Lucifer gets tossed back in the Cage, loses his grip on Hell, then it’s like the tourniquet coming off and you should get it all back.  But I can’t know for sure.  This stuff’s not exactly in the lore, but I guess…I’ve been studying it a long time and this is what I think, Crowley.”

He nodded quietly, met the hunter’s eyes.  “Thank you, Moose.”

“Which did you want?  To be human or demon?”

“I don’t know, Moose.  I hardly remember being human, but I know…Bobby would prefer it.”

“I dunno, Crowley.  I think he’s kind of fond of you, whichever you are.  Just a random guess.”

“Don’t push the Dr Phil moment, Gigantor.”

When Bobby and Dean returned, the latter bearing a couple of brown paper bags of various groceries, Bobby came quickly over to Crowley, who was apparently having an oddly amicable chat with Sam Winchester concerning the curse on King Tut’s tomb and the demon who had been responsible for it.  “It’s all right, love;  neither of us is bleeding,”  Crowley greeted him.  He caught Dean regarding Sam, evidently checking for the same thing, smirked at him and turned back to Bobby.

“So?’  the older hunter asked. 

“So we’re on the same team to put Lucifer back in the box,”  Crowley said.  He coughed a little and reached a hand up to massage his throat.

“What did you do?”  Bobby demanded of Sam.

Sam displayed the hip flask, shoved it back into his coat.  “Holy water.  One sip and he’s coughing and smoking.  But he can’t throw me into the wall or do any of that fun stuff until we lock Lucifer down.”

“And if we do that, what’s gonna happen with Amara?”  Dean muttered.

“If you don’t deal with Lucifer first, I’m not going to be able to help you very much when she comes calling, am I, Squirrel?”

“But you know stuff,”  Dean argued.  “Like I said before.”

Crowley sighed with exaggerated patience and got to his feet, coughing some more.  In front of Bobby and Sam, he crossed to where Dean stood and raised a hand slowly to pat his cheek.  Bobby was interested to see that Dean didn’t stop him, only stared challengingly back at him.  The days when they had spoken to Crowley from outside the confines of a devil’s trap were definitely long gone.  The King of Hell stood face to face with Dean Winchester.  After a moment, he patted Dean a second time and removed his hand.

“Lucifer is stronger than I am,”  he said, quietly for him.  “But there is _no_ saying whether he will go against Amara simply because he can.  Or that any of us will like the result if he does.  The enemy of our enemy already hates our guts.”

“We have to get Cas back,”  Dean said.  Blunt, no prevarication, that was Dean.

“We’ll try, Squirrel.”

“Point to note,”  Bobby mentioned.  “We might not get an actual choice in the matter, you know.  Whichever one shows up in our sights, might be a good idea to just shoot.”

“We are _not_ shooting Cas!”

“What we need to do,”  Bobby overrode him, “is for all of us to get to your bunker.  Start looking through that library for anything we can use.  We can’t do shit at the moment because we have no idea where Lucifer or Amara is.  And I think maybe we should start considerin’ who we might want to get to safety.  Things might not hold steady for very much longer.”

“Jody and the girls?”  Sam questioned, clearly not sure of the wisdom of that move. 

“Garth?”  Dean grimaced.  “I’d murder him.”

“Me first,”  Bobby muttered, then remembered his role as the voice of reason.  Might as well keep going that way, he thought.  “Don’t think we need to gather folk in yet, just have a word, make sure they’re ready to bug out if they need to.  And I guess I should ask if you two are gonna be okay with Crowley comin’ in?  And Crowley, whether you’re okay with comin’ back to the bunker?”

His gaze had a hint of appeal as he looked at the demon and Crowley’s own eyes softened a little as he nodded.  Sam and Dean evidently had one of their lightning wordless consults, because Sam spoke quietly for them both.  “Yeah.  Both of you.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do hope this makes sense. Please let me know if it doesn't.....

Bobby stirred from the most comfortable sleep he’d had in awhile, not sure where he was or what was going on for a moment, until something moved against him in the bed and let out a muffled cry.  _Crowley_ , he thought, shifting a hand to grasp the demon’s shoulder.  Crowley had evidently woken himself;  he subsided with a quick in-draw of breath.  “I’m all right, love,”  he rasped.  “Nasty message from my subconscious, that’s all.”

Bobby drew him close, settled his arms about him and heard Crowley’s sigh of contentment in his ear.  “Anythin’ useful?”

“I was making a deal with your boys, I think.  They had drawn a devil’s trap…”

“For you?”

“No, oddly enough.  I think it was for Lucifer; there was some trap being planned and I wanted him dealt with first, as I do.”  Crowley’s voice became more wakeful, but he didn’t try to extricate himself from Bobby’s embrace. 

“What was I doin’ in all this?”

“You weren’t there, love.  You never came up at all, as though you weren’t….on this plane of existence.”

“Alive, you mean.”  Their room was dark, with only a sliver of light from the corridor beyond the door.  They were in the bunker, Bobby told himself sternly, not buried alive down a mine shaft.  Everything had gone pretty well over the last few days, even the journey here, though being in a separate car from Dean and Sam had probably helped.  The boys had been pretty civil, really, not even making a scene when Crowley had walked through the front doorway under his own steam for the first time.  Or, more importantly, when they’d gotten the supplies and Bobby’s books inside, and Dean started saying they needed to plan their strategy.

It had been late at night, not that this ever stopped the Winchesters or Bobby himself, for that matter, despite the fatigue of the journey.  But Bobby had noted the strange sight of Crowley fighting his tiredness and stress, trying to show no weakness to any of them.  He had moved close to him and put an arm around Crowley’s shoulders and told the boys they were going to bed and the council of war could be _tomorrow_ night, thanks very much.

Sam and Dean’s expressions had been classic, though.

“You could put it that way,”  agreed Crowley, and Bobby had to struggle to remember what he had said.  True, the concept of ‘being alive’ was a bit different to somebody who had existed both on Earth and in his afterlife, the latter being far longer than his human life.  “And I think Rowena was there too.”

“She might not be dead, you know.”  Bobby wasn’t sure whether this was comforting or not, but he had read about the power of witches.  There wasn’t much that was harder to kill.

“If that’s sweet talk to get me in the mood, love, it’s not working.”

“I’m not sweet talkin’ you.  You woke me up.”  Bobby yawned, but his hand rubbing Crowley’s back was gentler than his words. “Night, Crowls.”

“ _Crowley._ ”

*

Bobby couldn’t remember what he’d been dreaming about, but he woke from that sleep into a state of sharp wakefulness.  No noise, nothing that could have woken him.  Crowley wasn’t moving about or even snoring.  The hunter listened for a few moments, then settled back, not quite relaxing.  Then a thought came to him:  _Crowley was having trouble with his abilities before Lucifer’s jail break._

When Sam and Dean had asked them here before, ostensibly for a hunters’ council of war, but in actual fact at Jody’s instigation, Bobby had had to drive, since Crowley hadn’t been able to teleport.  He’d never explained that, just assured Bobby that things had gotten better.  For the rest of it, Bobby hadn’t really been able to tell much, since unless he was under direct threat, when Crowley was around him or the boys, he seemed to prefer just to stand there and run his mouth.  Particularly around the boys.  _So is it really Lucifer?  If it’s something else, what could mess with Crowley and not end up in a charred heap?  Maybe closer to the mark;  what would want to?_

He fell asleep again while he was still pondering.

Later in the morning, in the kitchen getting coffee, Sam came in after a run outside.  He might have to start doing that, Bobby decided, or at least a walk, see some natural light and breathe some fresh air.  “Hey,” Sam greeted him.  “Dean up yet?”

“Haven’t seen him,”  Bobby answered.  “It’s not noon yet, is it?”

“He’s not _that_ bad.  Where’s Crowley?”

Bobby muttered something as he went to sit down at the table with his mug.  “He _is_ that bad.  Still under the covers like he thinks the sky’s about to fall in.  Sam, you and Dean saw more of Crowley than I did, last few years.  No, hold on, I got to ask you something before you sound off about him again.  This thing with his abilities; you reckoned it was Lucifer shutting off his access to souls in Hell, was it?”

“Yeah,”  Sam said, puzzled as he came to sit opposite Bobby.  “Demons get their juice from the souls they bring to Hell, or that demons under their control bring in.  Lucifer’s on the throne now, the nexus of all that power, and he’s shut the door on Crowley.”

“Crowley was havin’ trouble before that,”  Bobby said, not able to stop himself checking the door for signs of the man himself.  “Like the time Jody talked you into gettin’ him here so she could…”

“She didn’t tell us that’s what she wanted…”

“Save it, Sam, I don’t care right now.  Do you know of somethin’ that could mess with him, that was active before Lucifer got free and is active now?  Somethin’ or someone with a grudge against Crowley who _also_ has the power to nix him?”

“Amara.”

“This was happening before she did her latest growth spurt,”  Bobby corrected.  “He was holdin’ her and she couldn’t get away until her power expanded.”

“Doesn’t mean she couldn’t have done something,”  Sam said slowly.  “From what I’ve been able to find out, she _was_ able to get close to him.  I’m not saying he trusted her – she was a total unknown – but if she could have set a spell that continued along, got stronger as she did…Bobby, I’m mostly guessing here.”

“He’s totally susceptible to what works against demons,”  Bobby said and Sam nodded.

“So whoever did this knows a fair bit about his kind.  Does that describe Amara?”

“Not really,” said Crowley’s voice next to his ear.  Bobby nearly went into orbit.  _I just looked for you,_ he wanted to yell, but managed to quell the impulse.  Crowley didn’t seem upset, however.  He looked deceptively ordinary in the blue t-shirt and his usual black trousers, and he rested a hand on Bobby’s shoulder.  “But it does describe another female of our acquaintance.”

“You said she was dead,”  Sam said.

“I said Lucifer broke her neck.  Witches have a bad habit of not staying dead.”

Bobby looked up at Crowley, trying to work out what was behind the calm expression and deadpan delivery.  Was he upset or furious, or did part of him _want_ Rowena alive? 

“We’ll find out,”  Sam sounded almost sympathetic, or at least willing to speak to Crowley as though he was….a person, Bobby thought, someone who was allied with them, if not exactly a friend.  “What I did before, that was mostly just finding out if you still reacted to stuff like a demon, and you did.  You have to know heaps more about this than I do, I just read it in the lore.”  He ran a hand through his tawny mane, looking frustrated.  “Things a witch can do, if she can only get close enough to a person to touch him.  And if it’s true, Crowley, if we can fix this, then…”

“We can concentrate against Amara the way you want,”  the King of Hell agreed.  Bobby somehow could not stop thinking of him as that, whatever his current status.  “With the chance that Lucifer will go for her before he goes for us.”  He made an exaggerated face.  “Love that idea.”

“I’m gonna talk to Dean,”  Sam decided, getting up and taking his coffee with him.  “Bobby, he’s all yours.”

In the suddenly quiet kitchen, Bobby studied his demon with mixed feelings.  Crowley raised dark eyebrows at him and smirked, as though nothing at all bothered him right now.  “Well, darling, you heard the Moose.  I’m all yours.  What are you going to…”

“I don’t know,”  Bobby growled at him.  “This is way out of my league.  Things used to be simple, with werewolves and ghosts and the odd really nasty thing goin’ rogue on people.  Now it’s gods and angels…and you.  Sit down, can’t you, I’m getting’ a crick in my neck.”

Crowley pulled out a chair and sat down, still close to him.  He put his arm around Bobby’s shoulders and leaned against him.  He couldn’t remember ever doing this, with anyone, in life or out of it;  never trusted anyone enough for it.  “One thing at a time,”  he told the hunter.  “Will you help me work out whether Rowena has in fact done something unpleasant – really don’t need that word, she’s never done anything _nice_ to use as a contrast. “

“Well, sure I….”

“Don’t answer too fast, love.  Witches specialise in hiding what they’ve done.  It can’t be a hex bag spell, because to my knowledge, she’s never been here to the bunker and can’t get in here.  It’s not something on the surface, like an object in my clothing, because believe me, I know how to check for those things.  It does involve a physical component, linking to what Sam said about the person being able to touch me.  But not something I could find by looking at the surface.”

Bobby’s face twisted in a grimace.  “I don’t like where this is goin’.”

“Ever fancy yourself as a surgeon, love?”

“No way.  If you’re talkin’ about opening yourself up and searching your goddamned innards for – for somethin’ we don’t even know how to recognise, then you can get off that track.  It could kill you, you idjit…”

Crowley was about to retort, looking at the hunter’s face, then stopped.  He had taken this for Bobby’s usual bad temper when faced with something he didn’t agree with at all, mixed with concern that he didn’t want to admit.  He had learned to read expressions, detect moods, as though they were spoken words, something very important to a demon.  Crowley had once boasted that he had been selling sin to saints for centuries and that was no more than the truth.  Truth was always more dangerous than lies.

A demon, once he had been through the process of the racks, emerged as a skilled and twisted thing, always looking at humanity from the outside, because they themselves were no longer human.  It was this which Sam Winchester had challenged, to bring Crowley back.  He had brought him to the brink of humanity, tortured and weeping and bloody, and though he had not carried through with it, what he had left behind was a thing no longer quite of demonkind.  Something Crowley’s subjects had been able to detect.  Something Lucifer had well known.

When he had gone to Bobby Singer at last, having won the barest of trust from Dean, he had gone as something different from the creature who had played with the hunter in the old game of souls.  The anger Bobby showed him now was not the distrust he had displayed when Crowley put the deal to him.  The _fear_ of him was gone, Crowley saw, looking the hunter in his eyes.  Now only an overwhelming fear _for_ him was evident in Bobby’s face, and the way he reached out to embrace Crowley, rough and awkward instead of finishing his words.

This was something which Crowley had never known, so no surprise that he had failed to recognise it.  He had known it in himself that first time he and Bobby were intimate, when he had brought all his skills to bear on the seduction, in pleasing Bobby, so that the hunter would stay with him.  In that afterglow, his thoughts had broken free of the demonic and he had pleaded, as though to the god who disdained him:

_Let me keep this.  Let me keep him.  I don't care what else I give up.  I'll even help his damned boys, if I can just once have something – someone – for me._

He had interpreted his own emotion in the only way he knew;  as a deal, as a wanting to possess, to own.  The way deal magic touched and held.  But that wasn’t true at all.  He had fallen in love on that day and only now could he admit it, see that love returned in Bobby’s gaze.

“Robert,”  Crowley said, his throat feeling dry, “I’m about to sound like even more of an ‘idjit.’   First, I want to tell you that I love you.”

He saw Bobby’s cheeks redden, heard the embarrassed mutter, the way he broke his stare into Crowley’s eyes to regard the table for a moment.  The hunter who had met and defeated most of the monsters of the supernatural world for a moment couldn’t look at him or speak.  Crowley wondered whether he might be too embarrassed, whether he’d just try to sidestep this, but he had underestimated Robert Singer.  “I love you too, you idjit,”  the hunter said.  “Won’t stop me pepperin’ your ass with rock salt if you try ropin’ me into some torture game to track down a damn witch spell in your body.  But look.  You said you were havin’ trouble with your powers way back, but at the motel when the boys came back, you were able to zap yourself.  And I’ve seen you do other stuff sometimes.”

Crowley sighed.  “I’d like to say that’s elementary, but I suppose it’s not.  I’m like a battery, love, every demon is.  When we’re in Hell, we’re plugged in, as it were.  Away from Hell, most demons are on their own, because they don’t have the power to link to energy the way I do, or the few demons high ranking enough do.  I went back to Hell after our visit here, but after Lucifer barred me, I was in exactly the same boat as my useless subjects.  I’m not lying to you, love.”

“Not sayin’ you were.  But this is messing with my head.  So when you were havin’ trouble before with your powers….what was that?”

Crowley shook his head.  “A test run?  More than one way to trigger a spell, you know.  Or else I have more enemies than I know about, which would scarcely be a surprise.”

“You keep sayin’ trigger.  What trigger?”

“Again, the occasion we came here to meet with your boys and other hunters, which turned out to be Sheriff Mills going all woman scorned on my ass, but anyhow. “You remember, the night before we travelled to the bunker for this supposed gathering of hunters.  That we, ah, crossed a certain threshold?”

Bobby looked desperately around.  No sign of Sam or Dean and he hadn’t heard them, but then he might not and he had been kind of distracted.  “We had sex,”  he hissed back.  “I know.  And it wasn’t because of your mother!”

“That sounds so wrong, Robert.”  Crowley shuddered delicately.  “But it wasn’t the actual sex that was the trigger, darling, delightful though it was.  I’m going to break what I suspect is a number one macho rule of this bunker, and mention my feelings.  After the event, I remember thinking the words that you described as not a deal but a prayer.  That I did not care what I gave up if I could have you.  You remember?”

“Doesn’t sound like a demon kinda thing at all,”  Bobby murmured.  “Yeah, I remember that.”

“And what I told you about the spell Rowena made to destroy the Mark of Cain, that among the ingredients had to be the heart of someone whom Rowena loved.  Loved enough, as it turned out, to make immortal.”  Bobby nodded slowly.  “I brought Oskar to her for that completion.  We think….more alike than I care to consider,”  Crowley went on.  “And if I was her, wouldn’t the perfect revenge be to strike me down, only and if ever I shared her one-time weakness of falling in love?”

“Oh shit.”

Crowley raised a hand to rub his eyes.  “Very eloquent, Robert,”  he murmured, but the rejoinder was more habit than anything.  “It would make me the instrument of my own destruction.”

“If it’s true.  So far you had an idea, that’s it.  We haven’t even looked up anything on witch love spells or anti love – whatever the hell you would call this.”  Bobby got to his feet, pulling Crowley up with him.  “C’mon.  Sam and Dean are gonna be in here soon and the library’s a lot more comfortable.”

*        *        *

Some time later, Crowley looked up from his reading at a slight sound and saw Dean, a bit bleary-eyed but definitely awake and dressed, by the Winchester standards, in a black t-shirt and jeans.  Bobby had gone out to make some lunch.  “Hey,”  the elder Winchester greeted him, which was almost effusive, considering who they were. “Sam said you think Rowena did something to you.  I mean, something we didn’t know about before.”

Crowley quelled his impulse to say something acerbic.  Dean just brought out that impulse in people, he thought, demons or not.  He wasn’t about to share the conversation he and Bobby had had, particularly not the bits about feelings.  “I suspect it,”  he said finally.  “Some little time bomb to thank me for helping out as regards the Mark.”

“Hey, if you hadn’t known where Oskar was, Sam and Cas would only have had to spend months tracking him down and I didn’t have that long,”  Dean pointed out.  “You probably saved my life.”

“Hm.  That didn’t occur to me, Squirrel.”

“So if you find the physical component, you can uncork yourself.”

Crowley blinked and studied Dean with a frown.  “The way your mind works is a wonder to behold,”  he drawled.  “Disturbing, but still a wonder of sorts.”

“What do you want me to start with?”  Dean asked, gesturing towards the pile of books by Crowley’s chair. 

“You want to help?”  Crowley honestly hadn’t meant to sound that stunned, but having Dean thank him, sort of,  had shaken the foundations a bit, he decided. “I, ah, how about this?”  He selected one of the books and held it out to Dean.  “We’re looking for anything to do with love spells, particularly their antithesis.  Their opposites,”  he specified a moment later, accurately reading Dean’s look.  “Also spells with delayed releases, that can wait years for a particular trigger.  And by the way, probably better not to ever take any of these books beyond the wards on this bunker, or the survivors of the Grand Coven will be on you like flies on carrion – in a fairly literal sense – because I suspect the books have got find-me spells on them.  Where’s Moose;  does he feel like a bit of research?”

“He had to go out,”  Dean said.  “Jody called and he’s headed over to see her.  I don’t know what it is but Sam hustled out pretty fast and said he’d call when he knew what was going on.”

“Planning on the fly, Winchester specialty.” 

“Crowley,”  Bobby said as he approached.  “Thought we had that talk about curbin’ the smart ass remarks.”

“Nah, he’s right on that one,”  Dean said, earning a surprised look from both Bobby and Crowley.  He took the offered plate.  Bobby sat down next to Crowley, who noted with an odd warm feeling that the hunter had put their sandwiches on the same plate.  “Corned beef,”  Bobby said.  “Couldn’t find any salad in there.”  He seemed a bit awkward about the basic fare, Crowley noted, though he hadn’t said anything about it.  He would have touched Bobby, at least leaned against him, if Dean had not been there, but he decided not to damage the fragile truce.  For now.  They ate the sandwiches and leafed through the books, commenting about this and that.  It was oddly companionable, Crowley thought.  Perhaps not odd;  his Robert and Dean would surely have spent time this way before, but for him, it was like a light shining into the quagmire of the Pit.

A door clanged shut, an unknown number of hours later, and Dean got up, moving quickly across the floor and down the steps to the War Room, which was the first area reached by someone entering via the front door.  Crowley and Bobby heard Sam’s voice, then Jody’s, higher and anxious.  As one, they put down the books and went to see.

“Don’t you pay any attention to the news?”  the sheriff was asking, sounding incredulous.  “Seems to me it might be a good idea.”

“When we’re tracking jobs, we do,”  Dean defended, with a quick confused look around at the others.  “Why?  What’s happened?  Uh, why’s Sam bringing your stuff in?”

Two teenaged girls were following Sam down the steps, also carrying backpacks.  Crowley focused his gaze inwards, clicked his fingers and cursed.  “Damn, forgot,”  he muttered.

“You don’t need to go out there,”  Bobby said.  He saw Sam’s laptop on the big table and went to open it up.  “Want to give us a clue, Jody?”

“All the time,”  she said.  “But this time it’s all over the news.”

Bobby wanted to growl at her to stop with the dramatics, but by then he had found a news program and he went silent as he stared at the human and vehicular chaos unfolding on the city street before them, mired in heavy snow which looked as though it had taken days to build up.  That, Bobby knew, was not the case.  The picture switched to an excited announcer babbling about the “freak storm” and then assuming a more sober aspect to discuss the deaths which had already occurred in Sioux Falls.

 “No way,”  Bobby exclaimed.  “Weather wasn’t too good but there was nothin’ being said about a snowstorm.  What happened to those people?”

“I don’t know, but it happened damn fast,”  the sheriff said.  “I was at the station, the girls were in school, so _I_ thought.  Claire, Alex, you want to explain?  You saw it.”

The two looked at one another, clearly too shaken to continue their usual feuding.  Alex, the dark-haired one, shrugged and Claire took over.  “Yeah, it was kind of cold and windy because, hey, winter on the way, but nothing crazy, you know.  Midmorning I was outside the principal’s office…”

Alex snickered and Claire shot her a glare.

“…where there’s a big window so I could see outside into the grounds.  The snow began falling and the wind picked up and I swear, within ten minutes it was a full on snow storm.  Weather people going crazy, saying there had been _nothing_ and then boom, this whole storm pattern coming in.  And not just us, it’s all over.”  Claire gestured at the laptop.  “Have a look.  East, west, you name it.  The principal came out of her office and started gabbling on her phone and a couple of teachers showed up and they decided we’d all have to head home  - yeah, I know, snowstorm but they were seriously losing it by then.  They’d forgotten I was even there.  So I took off and got Alex out of class about three minutes ahead of the general announcement and we got over to the station on foot to find Jody.”

“By which time I called Sam,”  Jody said, nodding, so the others assumed Claire’s account had been pretty well correct.  They knew the teenager had been through a period of mistaking perfectly ordinary events and people for hunter-type matters, and Claire too knew that her credibility was not what it could be.

“For a storm?”  Dean asked.

“Empathy fail, dude,”  Sam told his brother.  “It’s not just the snow and wind.  Temperature’s dived forty degrees in the last two hours.  If we were outside, you’d know about it.  Uh, I _did_ call Garth…”  Dean groaned and Sam held up a hand.  “He said he and his people are okay, they’re in their own bunker.  Which is a lot smaller than here but he says they’ll manage.  Since they’re all werewolves, I kinda believe him.  He’s coordinating the hunters on a bunch of rescue missions.”

He sat in front of the laptop and keyed quickly, bringing up in succession several images from news services around the world.  All showed snow, wind, arctic temperatures and rapidly rising death tolls due to accidents or exposure.  All unexpected.  One announcer used the term “impossible” and noting that she was speaking from a television studio in Perth, Australia, Bobby Singer agreed.  He stared aghast at the incredible sight of snow thickly covering roads and homes in the coastal city of Perth.  Which, the voice over from the American station told them, was currently coming into its summer season.

“That’s why I called Sam,”  Jody said drily, looking to Dean, Bobby and Crowley.  “He met us about halfway here;  I wasn’t going to wait for him to get to Sioux Falls, no need for that.  We grabbed some supplies and our stuff and headed out.  My car died out on a highway, so….thanks, Sam.”  Her words and tone were almost casual, but not her look towards Sam, who nodded awkwardly in return.

 _Storms can herald demonic activity_ , Bobby thought, trying to push these distractions from his mind long enough to work something out.  _We know that.  I’ve been able to home in on Lucifer that way before.  Even if he’s technically an angel, he’s the beginning of demons.  So this is him, this is the result of some massive working…but to bring an ice age down on the whole planet?_

“Amara,”  Dean said.  “She said she’s going to remake her brother’s creation in her own image.”

 _And that’s a chick who could also bring an ice age down on the whole planet._   _Who’d think we’d have a choice of enemies like this?_

“Why don’t you guys get Jody and the girls settled?”  Bobby suggested to Sam.  Dean pitched in at that and the whole crew moved away, everyone talking.  It was making Bobby’s head ache and by his expression, Crowley wasn’t a fan of it either.  Bobby checked his watch, mildly surprised to see that night must have fallen outside.  He felt hungry at the thought and put a hand on Crowley’s arm to steer him into the kitchen while the going was good.  The demon sat down at the kitchen table to watch him investigate fridge and pantry contents.  Several boxes stuffed with a variety of dry goods and some fresh sat on the table too;  probably the supplies Jody had mentioned, or Sam could have gotten more on the way back.

“Hungry?”  he asked Crowley, who thought about it and shook his head.

Bobby shrugged and retrieved a can of pork and beans which he tipped into a saucepan to heat up on the stove.  It was fuel and he was too preoccupied to bother with more.  “Thoughts on who we can blame for the weather?”  he asked.

“Either or both,”  Crowley said.  “I’d rather sort out who’s corking my powers, to borrow Dean’s phrase.  Then I might actually be some bloody use.”  His tone was acerbic and Bobby turned to face him, hearing the tension there.

“I’m not gonna get distracted,”  he assured him.  “Even if one or both of Lucifer and Amara have chucked the planet into the deep freeze, situation hasn’t changed.  We don’t know where either of them is.  But have we got any way of findin’ out what Rowena’s done, if anything?  I’ve been reading about freaking love spells all day and nothing close to this.  Plenty of misfirin’ spells, stuff that makes the supposed lover upchuck at the sight of his beloved and so on, but this?  What spell is there that’s goin’ to assume one of the parties is a demon?  If your mother – sorry, if Rowena did something, it’s particular to you and only you.  Look.  _Did_ she ever touch you?  Did she ever tell you she loved you?  I’m talkin’ when you let her loose in your court.”

“Early on,”  Crowley said, his gaze distant as he thought back.  “I’d only just freed her.  I was sitting on my throne and she kissed my forehead, like a mother with her child, and told me…she loved me.  Damned idiot that I was, I believed it.”  Self mockery was thick in his voice.  “She only wanted freedom to destroy me and gain power for herself.  Hard to believe she could have done something then, with no ingredients, nothing but her bloody, twisted mind.”  He shook his head wonderingly, a certain admiration in his voice.  “Damn shame she’s probably alive.  She’d make a cracker of a demon.”

“Some of the books I’ve looked at tell about what the powerful witches could do,”  Bobby said as he sat down, spooning the pork and beans out of his plate.  “The ingredients were more of a focusing tool for them, they helped, but the witch could do without ‘em if she was strong enough, had built up energies by human sacrifice and fun stuff like that.  Not so different from how a demon gets juice, huh?  So why do you think she’s still alive?”

“Because it’s a trigger spell.  Set back then, with a specific cue to activate, _but_ it would then have to start drawing on her power.  The initial setting was a deposit, as it were.”

“Still sounds like a lot of guessin’ to me,”  Bobby commented, continuing to eat.  Crowley looked at him, grimacing slightly as he saw the congealed food on Bobby’s spoon.

“When I’m back to myself, I’ll take you somewhere really nice for dinner,”  he promised.  “Meanwhile, love, you have something stuck in your beard.”

“Heads up,”  Bobby responded, absently retrieving a baked bean from his chin.  Sam, Dean and Jody came in a moment later.  All looked tired, the sheriff in particular.  She looked at Bobby eating, muttered, “I’m so starved that actually looks edible,”  and sank down, chin on arms, at the table.

“I’ll get you something,”  Sam said and began gathering ingredients.  Dean went to the fridge and brought back beer cans, offering one to Jody, who grabbed it like a woman dying of thirst, and Bobby, who considered, then shook his head.

“What did you do with Alex and Claire?”

“Leg irons are tempting,”  Jody responded, “but they’re actually tired enough to go to bed without threats.  Don’t think it’s sunk in yet, what’s happening.  I don’t think I’ve got my head around it yet.  Sam.  Food?”

“Give me a few minutes, unless you want what Bobby’s got,”  the younger hunter answered distractedly.  “Cheese omelette ok?”

Crowley snickered quietly to himself.  Bobby thought about it, then elbowed the erstwhile King of Hell in the ribs.  “Oi.  What did _I_ do?”  Crowley demanded.  Then Dean got it and also chuckled.

“Dude, you better hope Jody doesn’t figure that out.”

“Too tired to give a shit,”  Jody moaned into her arms.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for delays. I wanted to get some more written and checked over before I published any more of it, and also to work out some details in my head, as in how to end it. No more spoilers than there were before.

Bobby undressed and got into bed with a tired sigh.  He turned on his side to watch Crowley doing the same, neatly hanging up his clothing in the cupboard as he went.   Life sure was weird, the hunter decided.  Think back a few years and he was in that damn wheelchair, scared and angry and about to make a deal with a demon in an Armani suit.  Not much later, he’d been planning to destroy that demon’s human bones in order to escape from that same deal.  Crowley had reneged, no two ways about it, using the small print to dodge, exactly as a demon should.

But he had given Bobby back the use of his legs, which had _not_ been in the deal, no matter that he’d tried to save face with all that about teaching the hunter to make a better use of a deal.  That should never have mattered.  Demons lie.  They also use whatever out their prey gives them.

He had used his own out, in the end.  His name had become much too well known among the monsters he hunted, chief among them Dick Roman, Leviathan.  He hadn’t wanted to retire, to stop being the go-to hunter of all the hunters in the country, but he had figured he could come back, if and when things calmed down enough.  Yeah, right.  Calmed down around the Winchesters?

He had not expected Crowley to want to find him.  To want him.

That warmth filled his heart again, that curious, inexplicable bond.  He looked at the man, now just in boxers, closing the cupboard and turning towards him.  Crowley was not much below his own height despite all those stupid short jokes from the boys.  Somewhat plump, the weight gathering around his middle, with his dark hair receding a bit.  The beard was neatly trimmed now, making him look like a Hollywood villain when he wore that damn black suit.  And those bright dragon tattoos that burst out across his bare chest and arms, surely imbued with magic to look as fresh as the day they were inked in reds and blacks and greens. 

“What’s the matter, love? “  Crowley asked, his eyes seeming dark under lamplight, not golden as they could be in sunlight. 

“Nothin’.  Just lookin’.”

“I hope you’re feeling inclined to more than that,”  Crowley chided as he got into bed.  Bobby smiled;  he did, in fact.  He moved towards the demon, raising himself on his elbow to kiss him.  A world of crazy going on, he thought, and he was still horny, like a damn college kid.  Surely it was okay to take a bit of time for him.

“What time did I say I was goin’ to take a watch?”  he asked, leaning over Crowley, his chest brushing against the demon’s chest as he pulled himself  slowly over Crowley’s body. 

“Whenever somebody bangs on the door, love,”  Crowley said, somewhat acerbically, though his hands stroking Bobby’s back were still gentle.  “I wasn’t paying any attention to what the Moose or the Squirrel were saying as we were on our way to bed.”

“Thanks,”  Bobby muttered.  He leaned down to kiss Crowley again, a trail of kisses over his neck and face.  “Not like we’re under siege…”  That was probably not true, he thought distractedly.  He was between Crowley’s legs as the other man moved them to make room for him, wrapping himself around Bobby with increasing urgency.  They knew one another now, their rhythms and what each liked.  Bobby had the gel in his hand now, cool on his skin….he couldn’t remember when Crowley had lost the boxers, or when he had;  it didn’t matter, nothing else mattered as they moved together.

Bobby thought he slept, he wasn’t sure, in the aftermath.  He’d meant to go clean up, though here that meant a trip out of the room down the corridor to the nearest shower, but he had fallen asleep against Crowley.  He woke to a still quiet night and knew a moment of panic when he couldn’t feel Crowley beside him, reaching a hand out in panic.  It brushed against Crowley’s bare, warm shoulder and he heard that drawling British accent very soft now against his ear.  “It’s all right, love.  You’re all right.”

“Crowley?”

“I’m all right too, darling.”

“You’ll stay with me…”  His mind was confused with sleep, yet suddenly it was urgent to say the words.  “When you’ve got your powers back, when you’re properly….King of Hell again, you….won’t you?”

“I’ll visit Hell, love.  Stay with you.”

There was something strange in Crowley’s voice then, something at once soft and shaken, as though he had not expected the question.  “I don’t know what I am now, Robert,”  he said in the dark beside the hunter.  “But I am yours, whatever it is, if you want me.”

“Can you still think I don’t?”  Bobby sleepily wrapped his arms around Crowley, nuzzling blindly into his neck.  “Don’t care if you can teleport or blast folks or whatever, I just want you with me.  And I want you safe….safe as you can be, anyhow.”

“Go to sleep, darling.  You might make sense when you wake up.”

There was a knock on the door.  Bobby had gone back to sleep, leaving Crowley awake but content, cuddled up to the hunter’s warmth.  Cursing the fact he couldn’t simply zap himself over to stand behind whoever was knocking, in order to neatly strangle them, Crowley carefully disengaged himself and went to the door.  He opened it and smiled at Dean, who gawked in horror.

“Bobby’s asleep.  I’ll take the watch, unless you think you can’t trust me for some reason?”

“Yeah, fine,”  Dean mumbled, trying to look anywhere but at Crowley.  “Just put some damn pants on first!”

“Disturb Bobby and face the consequences, Squirrel.”

*

Crowley was still on watch, so called, sitting in a library armchair reading when Bobby stumbled in, fully dressed after his shower but still yawning.  “You should’ve woken me up.”

“And good morning to you too, Robert.  Why on earth should I wake you?  I didn’t need to sleep.”

Bobby crossed to him and dropped a kiss on the top of his head.  “Thanks, anyway.  What’s goin’ on, you know?”

“In here?”  Crowley lowered the book and glanced theatrically around the library.  “Not a great deal.  I think the teenagers are still asleep, but Sam and Jody are having breakfast in the kitchen.  Wouldn’t have a clue about Dean, but then he doesn’t really have a clue about himself.”

“Outside in the damn world, you complete idjit.”

Crowley tapped his fingers on the hardback cover of the book;  noted the nervous twitch and made himself stop.  Being down here without his usual abilities to know what was going on _did_ make him unaccountably nervous.  Having at least three of them be enemies, truce nor not, also didn’t help.  Still, he had spoken briefly with Sam, and had a look at the news via his laptop.

“There’s a lot of talking going on among the humans who think they’re in charge,”  he said.  “A lot of running around; individuals, the National Guard, politicians and/or climate change deniers flapping their mouths, and that’s just this continent.  No sign of Lucifer, no sign of Amara, bless her heart.  I think Sam and Dean want to go scout around and hope to stumble across something.  That _is_ their usual modus operandi, isn’t it?”

“Kind of, but they get lucky ….or unlucky more than you’d think,”  Bobby growled.  He did not want to ask about deaths due to the sudden storm.  Crowley would just tell him, and he’d warned Bobby a few times about not asking if he _really_ didn’t want to know.  So he changed course for the kitchen, where Sam and Jody were in earnest conversation.

“Hey,”  Sam said, cautiously friendly, when he saw Bobby.  “Uh, what did you do to Dean?  He came in here awhile ago looking like he saw, well, like a normal person would look like if he saw a ghost and muttered something about bleaching his brain, then went straight out again.”

“Wasn’t me,”  Bobby said resignedly.  “I haven’t even seen Dean this mornin’, and Crowley took the watch so I didn’t make contact with Dean last night.  Oh.”  He saw Jody grin.  “I’ll talk to him.  Not Dean.”  He saw the packet of Cheerios on the table and picked them up, deciding they’d do for morning fuel.  “Crowley says you guys are planning to head out and see what trouble you can attract.  You think Lucifer will just see you drivin’ around and decide to drop something on you, so you can try to put a bag on his head?”

“Kind of,”  Sam admitted. 

“You know Crowley thinks Lucifer could just wait a human lifetime until nobody remembers about any of this and then total humanity.  Or Amara could.”

“I think Lucifer would come for us,”  Sam said quietly.  “And I don’t see Amara being willing to wait around, after being trapped for so long.  You don’t have a way of getting Crowley’s powers back for him, do you?”

Bobby started to admit he did not and then stopped.  He put down his bowl and headed out of the kitchen, ignoring Sam and Jody’s queries, and up the stairs to the library.  Crowley was still there, reading.  Bobby went right up to him and grasped his shoulders.  “Ah – Robert?  Mind the pages there….”

“Crowley, we are gonna give your mother just what she wants.”

“What do you think that might be, love?”

“A chance at me.”

Crowley froze, then very slowly closed his book and set it down carefully before he looked up at Bobby.  The hunter half expected to see his eyes flashing red in demonic fury, but they remained green, his expression calm.  Still, Bobby knew the signs of emotional build up in Crowley and he tensed for it, but Crowley said nothing.  “Makes sense,”  Bobby continued warily.  “She came out of hiding to attack me in my house.  I figure she’ll be more likely to go for me if she thinks I’m alone again.  And yeah, it’s ego, but she wants to hurt you, right?  And she knows you well enough to have investigated _me_ , though I promise you I haven’t seen a single ginger hair of her.”

Still nothing and now he felt _really_ uneasy, but he gamely laid out what he had of a plan.   “It’s too much guessin’ at the moment.  Maybe Rowena is alive, maybe not….maybe Lucifer’s gonna attack Amara or they could even team up.  If we can take Rowena off the board, maybe we can get you your powers back and if not, that’s one less thing to think about…”

“And maybe you will be dead, have you considered that?  The Winchesters are very good at killing things and so am I, demon powers or not, but none of us would have been able to assist _had you been in your house when she burned it._   If we are lurking just out of sight while you pretend to be all alone, she may very well know it.”  He delivered the last two sentences with a chilling geniality that Bobby felt deep inside. 

“You got a better plan?”  he challenged.

“I tried having a better plan,”  Crowley snarled back, pushing himself to his feet, nearly arm’s length from Bobby.  “I went away.  I concentrated on trying to win Amara over and hoping that all the bad things currently in circulation would believe I no longer cared about you.  Was not even thinking of you.  I would have gotten the better of the Darkness in the end, if Lucifer hadn’t come into play!  But when I was in _extremis,_ thrown outwards by Lucifer with his demons on my trail, all I could think of was finding you.  Even if I brought Hell to your door.  That you and I both survived was beyond expectations, do you know that?  And now you think I’ll let you put yourself out there to…. _what_?”

He stopped his rising tirade very suddenly, looking past Bobby, who turned about to see and found himself facing Jody Mills, flanked by the two teenagers, who looked fascinated rather than alarmed.

“Thought you might want to lower the volume,”  she told Crowley.  “It’s very romantic, but everybody’s listening, so not particularly intimate any more.”

“Also he’s about to tell you it’s not your job to let him do anything,”  Claire advised.   Bobby, who had opened his mouth to inform Crowley of precisely that, closed it again.  He noticed also that Sam and Dean had shown up in the library, loitering behind Jody and trying unsuccessfully not to grin.

“Time for that war council, maybe,”  Dean called.  Crowley’s gaze went to him and now Bobby saw it, that damn _hope_ in Crowley’s face.  For inclusion, for friendship, whatever had been spawned from that time he and Dean had shared as demonic buddies.

“You lot go into the War Room and wait for us then,”  Bobby said.  “We’re not done here.”  He stood waiting until they retreated, then drew a deep breath and went to pull an armchair closer, tugging on Crowley’s arm to get him to sit too.  Crowley did, exhaling hard.  Bobby touched his face.  “You’ve gone all red,”  he murmured.  “Didn’t mean to do that.  I know why you went away.”  He pulled Crowley into his arms and just hugged for a few moments.  For a moment Crowley was stiffly resistant, then he sighed audibly and returned the embrace.  “I got to do what I can, though, you know that.  I can’t be useless.”

Crowley leaned his head against Bobby’s chest, feeling the rage leave him.  As a demon, rage was an ever present thing, tended by torture and horror, while the damned soul was grown into a creature of Hell.  Time was, all of Hell had cowered before his fury, while he drew on all its souls to fuel the punishment he dealt out.  In his dreams now, he was always angry, always alone and agonised and burning.  There was no Bobby for him there and he knew there was no way he could explain this to the hunter who held him, or the dread it gave him to think of Bobby in danger. 

“I won’t go alone,”  Bobby said to him.  “Anythin’ we plan, it’ll be you and me.  All right?”

“All right, love.  Well, shall we go and face the audience?”

“They won’t say a thing to you,”  Bobby promised him.  “Least the boys and Jody won’t, and I’ll smack those girls silly if they comment.”

Crowley was pleasantly surprised to find that Bobby was right;  none of the others even gave him a smirk.  Jody and Sam were passing out mugs of coffee and one landed in front of him without his asking.  He found himself seated next to Dean who muttered, “Thank God, pants.”  Bobby was on his other side and gave Dean an odd look.  “Tell you later, Bobby.  Maybe.”

Sam had his laptop in front of him on the table and seemed to be making notes.  “Minutes of the meeting,”  Crowley murmured, wondering how _that_ would look, years hence when someone dug up the records of the last of the Men of Letters.  The last two direct descendants of Adam, a town sheriff, a teenaged girl raised by vampires, the also teenaged child of the meatsuit worn by an Angel of the Lord/Lucifer, the number one hunter of all hunters _and_ the deposed King of Hell.  Nobody would believe it, of course.

“We have to get Cas back,”  Dean spoke up.  “So we need to trap Lucifer and make him leave.”

“You’re going to need an alternative host,”  Crowley said.  “He’s not like a demon.  Yes, he needs permission to enter but once there, there is no power I know of that will make him leave.”

Sam gave him a sour look but noted the information down.  Not that he didn’t already know it, Crowley thought, thinking of Gadreel, but some lessons needed to be repeated a few times to sink in, especially to a head as hard as Sam’s.

“I also think Bobby’s idea wasn’t that bad,”  Dean said, fielding Bobby’s glare and mutter of, “Thanks for nothing, boy.”  “We ought to sort out Rowena first, I mean, she’s the weakest of the three, isn’t she?”  At that, Crowley chuckled darkly.  “If she’s even alive, I mean, up here.  Then if it’s really her that bollixed Crowley up, then he’s got his powers to throw at the others.”

“I’m good,”  Crowley said, “but I’m not able to take out Lucifer or I would have fucking done it, rather than leave him in the Cage.  And you’ve already seen little Amara toss me sideways when she had her temper tantrum and decided she was all grown up and didn’t need Uncle Crowley any more.”

Dean blinked.  “Can you hear yourself, dude?”

“Boys.  Focus,”  Jody demanded.  Dean snapped to seated attention, staring straight ahead.  Crowley blinked in shock, then recalled that he was not actually in his throne room being king right now.

With Jody riding herd, it was decided that Sam and Dean would drive out to put eyes on the storm situation.  Alex and Claire were put on the computers, to “co-ordinate” as the sheriff diplomatically put it.  They were also to get as complete a picture of the global weather patterns right now as they could, and keep tabs on what the governments were doing about it.  It helped that these jobs were actually necessary, Bobby supposed, and the teens were probably better at it than he or Jody.  As for Crowley, he used an iPhone, but Bobby realised he had little idea of how comp literate the demon actually was.

“You got a job for us?”  he asked Jody, as Sam and Dean hastened out.

“I thought you might want to finish your argument,”  the sheriff said drily.  She met Crowley’s eyes with a slight nod.  Impressed in spite of himself, the King of Hell nodded back.  “When you do, come talk to me.”

Bobby led the way back to their room, as probably the most undisturbed place to talk.  Alex and Claire were setting up in the war room, their chatter disguising their worry as they fetched computers and snacks.  Claire was in full on junior hunter mode and Alex was swept along in her wake. 

Crowley walked into the bedroom, Bobby after him.  The hunter closed the door and waited, watching the other man pace about.  “We have to know for sure about Rowena,”  he said quietly.

Crowley laughed, but there was no happiness in it.  “I know,”  he said.

“So she’s ours to deal with.  Focus like Jody said.  They’re on the rest of it, as much as anyone can.”

“So what should we do?  Stay buried in this damn burrow and talk Rowena to death?”

Bobby shook his head and advanced to place his hands on Crowley’s shoulders and squeeze gently.  “We have to go get her,”  he said. 

“You want the sheriff to tag along?”

Bobby shook his head definitely.  Maybe he didn’t know this witch, but he did know her kind, and if she’d survived Lucifer and crippled Crowley, he didn’t want to think about the chances he’d be coming home from this one, or that Crowley would.

“Nor me.  Going to be awkward enough, introducing my boyfriend to my mum, without bringing my ex along too.”

“Geez, Crowley!”  Bobby shot him an embarrassed glare.  “We’re probably gonna be driving around like aimless idjits without a clue where to go, same as Sam and Dean.”

“Please.  We’re going to make it easy for Rowena.  We’re going to my last known topside hideout, where she and I met again after our long separation of, oh, four hundred years or so.”  He ended with a muffled sound as Bobby pulled him close against his chest and held his head against him. 

“Idjit,”  the hunter muttered, letting him go a few moments later, but he stroked Crowley’s hair and the demon didn’t try to get free of his hold.  “Even if talking is your way of dealin’ with stress, please keep a lid on it or I might need to gank ya before we even find Rowena.”

“Love you too, darling.  Now, put on a warm coat; it’s going to be rather chilly out there.”


	9. Chapter 9

“The boys said you set up house in a loony bin,”  Bobby mentioned, shining a flashlight around the dusty wreckage which had been Crowley’s topside ‘throne room.’  “Amara responsible for this mess or did you throw a party in here?”

“You don’t want to think too hard about demons throwing a party, love.”  The King moved around the windowless room slowly, pausing to look at the wrecked throne.  It had been intact when he left, so _someone_ had had a bit of a temper tantrum with it.  His brows raised a little as he examined the back of the throne, which looked as though it had been torn down the middle like a piece of paper.  “Come on,”  he said abruptly.  “I’ll show you Amara’s bedroom from when she was young and innocent.  Or something.”

“Right,”  said Bobby.  Just being in this place was making him want to take a shower.  On the surface, it was dusty and messed up, but didn’t really smell all that bad.  As a hunter, he could sense more than that.  Demons had used this place for long enough that their essence stained and fouled the place; cruelty and bloodletting had sunk deep into the walls and the memory of the place.  Even before that, there had been the misery of the trapped mental patients, confined without hope of cure or freedom.  He wondered whether that had drawn Crowley to claim it in the first place, and didn’t like the thought.  Crowley was….different here, as though this place was a very extension of Hell itself, reminding him of his full demonic identity and banishing Bobby to the very edge of his awareness.  “No,”  he said suddenly, stopping behind Crowley in the corridor outside.  “We oughta get out of here.”

Crowley turned to look at him, his eyes glinting demon-red in the flashlight, but before he could say anything, Bobby sensed a presence behind him and felt icy metal against his throat.  While he was still wondering how someone could have _done_ that, when he knew nothing had been there a moment before, the metal slid against his skin, oddly painless, and then a huge burning sensation flared outwards.

*

“Hello, Mother.”

Crowley was pleased at the tone of his own voice; just the right note of dispassionate resignation.  No surprise, though truly there wasn’t much, despite the fact he’d heard and seen her neck snap in Lucifer’s hands.  He shoved away the memory of his own unexpected grief, as though he’d been losing someone who was really his family and faced the reality of Rowena’s watchful, indifferent gaze.

She gave him that little, scornful smile; the one that said he really wasn’t worth the bother, then nudged Bobby’s fallen form with her foot.  “What’s this then, that you’ve gone and dragged in here?”

“Thought you knew, Mother, since you tried to burn his house down,”  Crowley said, still light, as though Bobby lying unconscious at Rowena’s feet wasn’t worth his trouble either.  “He’s a hunter friend of the Winchesters.  Robert Singer.”  He glanced up at her casually, found her still watching him.  “You decided his house needed burning awhile back, remember?  Speaking of dragging in here;  last I saw you’d made it to Hell itself, courtesy of Lucifer, but you don’t seem to be any more demonic than usual.  What brings you here, Mother?”

“Perhaps I just wanted to reconcile with my dear son,”  Rowena trilled, her smile broadening.  “Perhaps my return from death at the hands of a man I thought loved me has taught me to appreciate family more.”

“I don’t actually care how you did it,”  Crowley said bluntly.  “Witches have more tricks than Loki himself.  You know what I think, Mother?  I think you’ve been trying to suck up to Lucifer, and when that spectacularly failed, I think you tried the same thing with Amara.  I think she used you as much as you could be used and then she cast you on the winds, to live or die with every other creature in this world.  So you came back to the place I kept you in the hope of scraping together some sort of deal for yourself with me.  Close to the mark, am I?”

Rowena shrugged, the long sleeves of her gown shaking like feathers.  She prodded Bobby again with the toe of an elegant, high heeled leather shoe.  Someone had been providing her with wardrobe, Crowley thought; the glittery black and silver gown and the high-end shoes.  All she needed was the Cruella de Ville fluffy white muff around her neck. “You can dream up whatever story you like for me, Fergus, it doesn’t matter to me what you think.  But I am curious as to why you brought this hunter with you.  Or was he here ahead of you and I bravely saved your life?”

Crowley made a disgusted noise before he could stop himself.  It would probably have been better to agree with her, then cast off any idea of gratitude.  She seemed unarmed, but a witch was never unarmed.  “Alone” was also a meaningless concept.  It wasn’t impossible for a demon to wear a “customised” meatsuit, or have utilised a spell to make him see a stranger as Rowena, but that contempt in her eyes, that was nothing a stranger would have been able to show him.

“He’s my ally of the moment,”  he said instead, “and I happen to still have a use for him, so I hope you haven’t permanently scrambled his brains.”

“Oh my, do you still have that pathetic wish for friends?”  Again the trilling laugh, but he sensed a hesitation.  Rowena was not certain how to proceed.

“Sounds good from you.  You’re the one who actually had a heart’s love to kill to work that spell.”  Anger flared in her eyes and he narrowly stopped himself from grinning.  “And I said ally, not friend.  I have Deal Magic, mother dear, which no witch ever born could ever get her hands on.  And unless you have some actual purpose behind trying to cut his throat and delaying me, I do have things to get on with.  So if you don’t mind…”  He stepped forward as casually as he could;, desperate to see what damage had been done to Bobby. 

“I don’t think so, Fergus.”  At that, the simple, flat, indifferent tone, Crowley stopped dead.  His fishing had finally netted him the answer he wanted and her next words confirmed it.  “I know a lot of things you’d rather I didn’t know, I’m sure.  I know that you don’t have any powers at all, or you wouldn’t still be standing here trying to talk your way out.”  She held up her right hand and closed the fingers into a fist.  “That’s your powers.  And they’ll stay bottled up on the other side of Hell until you stop your ridiculous posturing and do what you’re told.  I also know who this man is, or rather, what he is to you, or I would hardly have bothered to try to kill him, would I now?   So kind of you, to give me a way of paying you back for making me kill Oskar.  He was so much better than you are!”  A glimmer of real emotion was in her eyes now, for a moment before she forced it back and smiled at him again.

Then she unclenched the hand and held it up high.  “I knew you would come back here, searching for me, once you learned that the Dark Prince hadn’t killed me after all.  So I brought some friends with me to help out.”  At that, other forms began filing into the chamber and Crowley stared, trying to identify them.  Not demons.  Not witches either;  some of the people spreading out to surround him were men.  Mortals.  In spite of himself, he looked to Rowena and she laughed.

“Don’t you recognise them, Fergus?  Although I suppose you may not have met most of them, only their friends and family members who made deals with you.”  Her voice became cold.  “Here he is, my friends, the King of Hell now, then King of the Crossroads, boss of all the demons who made those sweet deals with your families and then had them dragged to Hell to suffer agonies for _one little mistake._   And here,”  she indicated Bobby, “here’s a human who played along, because no one wanted him except a demon.  Put him in a cell.  Then you may teach my son all the lessons you like.”

*

_Not made human after all.  A human would have died._

Instead, Crowley woke up, feeling a cold concrete floor at his back.  He was still dressed, mostly, though his clothes were ripped and bloody with his own gore, soaked through and causing cloth to stick to his flesh.  He tried to teleport, hope against hope, but nothing happened.  Finally, reluctantly, he opened his eyes.  A dungeon cell, of course, one of his very own.  It smelled of fresh blood and piss – ah – so blood wasn’t the only bodily fluid to have soaked through.  Crowley grimaced;  he had not suffered that particular indignity since he got off the racks.

He was alone.  Light shone under the door and through the small barred window and he could hear human movement and voices beyond.  Rowena’s latest little band of groupies.  It was also very cold.  He wouldn’t have called it an ice age – modern media did so exaggerate – but enough to make him get to his feet and move about in an effort to warm up.  He wasn’t in chains, which was a failing he’d never have committed himself, but it seemed this lot underestimated him, after the recent beating.  “Bobby?”  he said, almost a whisper, not really expecting a reply.

But he got one.  “Missing your human?”  came that hated lilting voice in the Scottish accent he had lost, after his death.  Rowena blurred into view and then became fully solid.  An illusion, Crowley knew;  she had been standing there all along under a simple invisibility spell.  “I never did think much of you, Fergus, after we reunited, but I did at least think you were a man, not a pervert.  What you do with that hunter now was a hanging offence once, you know?”

“Of course I know,”  Crowley snarled.  “And you couldn’t give a damn whether I liked men, women or goats, _Rowena_ , all you care is that you’ve got something to use against me.  It’s fairly clear that you want something, so why don’t you get on and flap your mouth about it?”

One of her followers had slashed him on the cheek, sometime during the melee of blows, and that cut extended all the way to his lip, creating a tugging, burning sensation when he spoke.  Crowley mentally noted that one for future attention.  Rowena moved around his cell, and him, as though she was inspecting the walls for dirt.  Or clean spots, which was more likely.  Crowley got a grip on his patience;  she was hoping he’d explode, he knew, but before anyone spoke inside the cell, a crashing sound from beyond attracted their attention.

“What on earth are the children doing now?”  Rowena asked fretfully.  She went to the window and called through it.  “Be _careful­._ This place is condemned, you know, don’t go hitting the walls.”

“Don’t you even have guards outside, Mother?”  Crowley asked lazily. The interruption had given him time to get control and he was King of Hell arrogant as he studied her.  “Goodness, what if I made a break for it?”

“I’d only kill Singer before you were even off the grounds,”  Rowena shrugged and called out again.  “Jerome!  Sara!  Back here at once.”

The only answer was a cry of pain.  Crowley smiled.  Rowena shot a glare at him and rapped on the door.  “Jerome!  Open this.”

“Trapped too, are we?”

“Shut up, Fergus!”

Then an unexpected face appeared at that window.  Jody Mills looked at him, then at Rowena, who began to speak in Latin, eyes fixed on the sheriff.  Crowley lunged at Rowena, got his arms tightly around her and knocked her to the ground, hearing her head hit the concrete with some satisfaction.  When he got a hand over her mouth, she bit him and he cursed.  By that time, Jody had the door open and was inside, a gun in her hand.  From further away Crowley heard more yelling and his grin widened.

“Do I hear the dulcet tones of the Winchesters?”

“We’re your rescue party,”  Jody said.  “You could show a bit of gratitude.”

“Gag this ginger bitch….ouch….and I will shower you in jewels….”

“Why are you doing that?”

“Because she’s a witch, darling, and she’s trying to spell you and probably me.  Please knock her out before she’s able to concentrate long enough to use a spell that doesn’t…ouch…require speaking aloud!”

Jody shrugged.  “You only had to ask nicely,”  she said, and brought down the gun on Rowena’s head.  Through the mingled shouts outside the cell, Crowley discerned Sam’s voice, and then Dean’s.  Jody went to the door and called to them.

“Bobby is somewhere here,” Crowley said urgently, busy gagging Rowena with his own tie, just in case.

“We did figure that,”  Jody said, more gently.  “You’re one hell of a mess, aren’t you, _Roderick_?”

 _And it’s going to get worse_ ,  Crowley thought, looking down at Rowena.  He had had a blade with him, of course, but they had taken it.  “Do you have a sword or a sharp knife?”

“I’ve got a pen knife,”  Jody said.

“Not quite what’s required.”  With an effort he hefted Rowena up, over his shoulder.  “Ladies first, Sheriff.”

With an ironic look, Jody went out of the cell and along the passage, back towards his makeshift throne room.  It looked as though the Winchesters had simply shunted Rowena’s followers out through the front door.  He could hear their protests from that direction and Sam’s, calm voice in return, telling them to keep going.  Had they played the FBI card,  Crowley wondered, but that wasn’t top of his mind.  Not when Bobby Singer was sitting on the ground against the wall, with Dean kneeling next to him, talking softly and urgently.  Bobby saw him, his face lighting up in an awkward smile and Dean turned.

“He was locked up,”  Jody announced.  “With her.”

“Rowena?”  Dean said.  “Shit, you were right.”

“I don’t know why you’re so surprised, Squirrel,”  Crowley drawled.  “Now, we need to wake her up and find out what she wanted.  We hadn’t quite got to that when your rescue party crashed this one.”

“It’s not quite that simple,”  Jody groaned.  “You can’t hit someone like I did and expect them to wake up and start talking with a little bit of water splashed on their face like the damn movies.”

Crowley shrugged and heaved Rowena off his shoulder.  She slithered to the ground and lay still. 

“Why the fuck did you do that?”  the sheriff yelled.

“She was heavy.”  He stared down at the fallen witch with an expression he knew was unreadable.  “And she’s playing possum.  Aren’t you, Mother dear?”

Rowena’s eyes opened with an expression of pure hate and Jody gasped in shock.

“Better be quick with the interrogation,”  Crowley advised.  “I’ll just be a moment.”

“Hey, where are you going?”  Dean called after him.

Crowley was anxious to be as good as his word.  Rowena would recover her faculties and slip the gag a lot quicker than even Dean would anticipate, though Crowley would have trusted no one else to manage the situation.  He walked quickly through the building which had once been the most secret and unexpected of hellish headquarters, heading for the nearest weapons cache.  Not the armoury, not the weapons his demons had known of, but those he had concealed himself, a score of just-in-case backups, around the old asylum.  This one was a hidden panel, a murmured word of an Enochian spell, and Crowley had a sword in his hands.

When he got back to the wrecked throne room, Dean was almost yelling at Rowena and Bobby was on his feet.  His throat was bandaged but Crowley was relieved to see the wound was minor.  The trick had been for Rowena to touch Bobby, to hit him with an unconsciousness spell, the rest, window dressing for Crowley’s benefit.  When Bobby saw Crowley walk back in with the sword, he got the others’ attention and everyone turned, except Dean, who was tying Rowena’s hands behind her back.  He had sat her up against a wall for this and Crowley nodded;  that would help.

“Uh, I think you can stand down, Crowley,”  Bobby called.

“Not quite yet.”  He walked over to Rowena and raised the sword.  “Hold her, Dean.”

“What the fuck are you doing?”  Dean asked.

“There are only a few dependable ways to kill a witch.  Beheading them is one.  Now, either hold her or get clear.”

“She’s your damn mother, dude!”

“You cried when you thought Lucifer killed her,”  Bobby put in, coming over.  Crowley’s eyes flashed red.  Rowena spared a moment from giving him a death stare to look astonished.

“Could you not murder the alleged offender in front of an officer of the law?”  Jody yelled.  Crowley considered this, nodded, and grabbed Rowena by the scruff of her gown and began to drag her towards the door.  “No!  That is not what I meant.”

Crowley stopped, beginning to feel rather vexed.  “You want me to just let Rowena go?  After everything?”  He moved the sword slowly to rest against Rowena’s throat, then raised it with an expert little twist to cut the – was that one of Dean’s socks? – gag away, letting it fall.  “Begin to say anything that sounds like a spell and this goes through you,”  he informed her.  “So.  How about an admission and then a dispelling of whatever you did to me.”

“I can help you,”  Rowena said quickly.  “You need me against Lucifer and Amara.  I’ve met Amara;  I probably know things about her you don’t.  Goodness, I came here to offer my help against her _and_ Lucifer in the first place.”

“Doubt you know anything,”  Dean growled, now on his feet.

“Well?”  Crowley asked.  Rowena looked up at him, first at his face and then rather lower.  The direction of her gaze made Crowley pause and then actually blush.  Bobby, who was watching him the most closely, distinctly saw the flush.  “Stop looking at me that way.  You’re my mother, for Hell’s sake.”

Rowena laughed merrily.  “The body you’re in is not my son, oh Demon King of Hell.  And you might want to have a look at yourself.  The sigil’s there.  Clean it with holy water and you’re done, though it might sting a bit.”

Dean choked and turned away, but Jody seemed fascinated;  she exchanged WTF looks with Bobby and then back at Crowley, who felt the heat rise to his face and was sure he was now hyperventilating.  Before he could speak to clarify that his mother was indeed saying what he thought she was saying, Bobby stepped up, taking a silver hip flask from his jacket pocket.  “That way,”  he said, and Crowley shuffled backwards through the doorway and a few steps along, to be out of sight of those within.  “Okay, drop your pants.”

“This is not _exactly_ how I planned our reunion,”  Crowley muttered as he obeyed.

“This is probably gonna postpone that reunion,”  Bobby warned.  “I’ll, uh, use as little as I can to do the job.  I gotta get lower.”  He knelt and Crowley spared a brief prayer to the Being he did not obey that nobody decided to follow them out.  “Oh yeah.  I can see it now.  It’s kinda….underneath.  I’ve got to, um….”

“Would you please get the hell on with it?”

Bobby’s cough was dangerously close to a laugh.  Then Crowley felt a dab of wetness which at first felt like only water and then a pinprick of heat.  As Bobby stood up, using Crowley as a crutch to do so, the heat spread and intensified, as though someone held a match to his….”Damnation!”  Crowley gritted his teeth and yanked his pants back up.  He had a witch to dispose of. 

“Well?”  Bobby asked.

Crowley snapped his fingers and the results of his beating by Rowena’s followers instantly vanished, leaving him groomed and dapper once more.   Then he stalked back into the wrecked throne room, finding Rowena on her feet, fastidiously brushing herself off, with Dean and Jody watching her closely.

“Back together, are we, Fergus?”  she asked.  “That was a show of good faith, in case you didn’t recognise it.  Now, how about my side of it?”

“We didn’t make a deal,”  Crowley growled.  He lifted the sword and Jody began to say something, warning in her voice.  The King ignored her and brought the blade in, sharp and hard towards Rowena’s neck.  In the same instance she smiled . . . and vanished.  Crowley’s strike went on through empty space before he caught up with himself and halted it, throwing the blade to the ground with a disgusted snarl.  “Damn it!  She had something set up to go, when that blocking sigil was removed!”

“I like her idea of good faith,”  Sam said from the doorway.  He looked a bit nonplussed that everyone was gazing at him.  “Uh, the groupies are on their way, but they’re gonna be back tomorrow, they said, even if we are the FBI working undercover.  Hey, Bobby, what were you and Crowley doing in the passageway there?”

Dean coughed and Jody looked away into the distance, quite failing not to grin.  Bobby felt his face begin to heat up, wondering just when Sam had come back inside.  Crowley snapped his fingers and a flame sprang to life on his palm.  “All fixed, Moose,”  he said meaningfully.

“Rowena put a sigil on Crowley’s prick,”  Dean said.  “Bottled him up.”

“Please!”  Bobby said swiftly, desperately to Crowley, whose eyes smouldered red.  “They did save us.”

“Fine,”  the King of Hell growled.  “Then they can just take the long way home instead of being fried.”

*

Bobby emerged from his hot shower, in clean sweatpants and t-shirt, just in time to hear the clatter and voices from the direction of the stairwell.  Claire and Alex were greeting the returned trio and the hunter quickly kept going towards his room.  He didn’t think they would be all that happy to see him right this second.

In the room, Crowley was sitting up in bed, reading something on a borrowed laptop.  He was shirtless and his bright dragon tattoos caught Bobby’s eye and he smiled.  “You look a bit happier,”  he said, sliding on to the bed beside the demon.  “The boys and Jody just got back, by the way.  They might have a word or too to say to you about makin’ em return the long way.”

“Bollocks,”  Crowley said briskly.  “I can’t transport a car – at least, I never tried – and can you imagine Dean being willing to leave it behind?  At least this way he had company on the drive back.”

“Fair point, I guess,”  Bobby conceded.  “Aren’t you worried that she got away, though?”

Crowley considered that and shrugged.  “Not really.  She’s been wandering around doing whatever for centuries and our paths never crossed.  If she stays away from me, I’m happy to wait until she really does arrive below.”  He smiled in a way which made Bobby uneasy.  “I think she’ll keep her distance from both of us, love.”

“So we can go home?”  Bobby asked.  He hadn’t meant to say that, not so soon, but once said, he knew how much he wanted to be back, even in a house that wasn’t his old familiar home, above ground.  Sioux Falls was still home, no matter how severe the winter got.  Then he blinked a couple of times.  Crowley was still on the bed, but now he was sitting above the coverlet, and it was Bobby’s bed in the Lebanon house.  The instant chill struck Bobby’s skin everywhere, even through his clothing, and he muttered something, grabbing for the robe on the back of his bedroom door.

Crowley snapped his fingers and it was instantly warm.  He watched Bobby, an oddly hopeful look in his eyes and the hunter walked back to the bed.  “You’re a legend,”  he managed, though his gut was queasy.

“You should have told me earlier,”  the demon chided.  “I would have brought us straight back here.”

“Wasn’t thinkin’ that clearly,”  Bobby muttered, reaching for his phone.  “Uh, Dean?  No – I’m not in the room.  You think I’d ring you up when I was a few yards away…well, that’s you - no, Crowley and I are back at my place in town, Sioux Falls.  He figures Rowena’s had her tail feathers singed enough for the time bein’.  Well, when you have a plan that needs us, you let me know.  I’ll probably be drivin’ over to visit that library soon anyhow, but I’m gonna get to work from here, see what I can work out about this cold snap and if they’re even responsible.  Weather’s weird enough sometimes even without Satan and the Darkness wanderin’ around the world.  Ah!” 

Crowley had slithered over to where he sat on the side of the bed and begun kissing Bobby’s ear and working his way downwards.  “No, that wasn’t to you. No, he isn’t – you think I’d call you if we were doing….. _No_ , Dean, making out is what _you_ say.  Goodbye, Dean.  Tell Jody – yeah…..I’ll talk to you.  Sometime.”

 

The end

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, here it is; I hope you enjoyed it. I didn't feel able to tackle the ultimate question of God, Lucifer and/or Amara, who are not in any case my focus in this series. I quite like the way canon is dealing with the Deity, the Devil and the Darkness, though at time of writing I have not seen the final ep of season 11. I may write about them myself later if inspiration strikes but feel they are more of a concern for Sam and Dean than they are for Crowley, whom I'm sure doesn't really believe in an end of everything.


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